Nouveau Gallium3D Moves Closer Towards OpenGL 4.5 Compliance

While the RadeonSI and Intel i965 Mesa drivers have been at OpenGL 4.5 compliance for a while now, the Nouveau "NVC0" Gallium3D driver has been bound to OpenGL 4.3 officially.

This Nouveau Gallium3D driver for NVIDIA "Fermi" graphics hardware and newer has effectively supported all of the OpenGL 4.4/4.5 extensions, but not officially. Originally the NVC0 problem for OpenGL 4.4 and newer was the requirement of passing the OpenGL Conformance Test Suite (CTS), which at first wasn't open-source. But now The Khronos Group has made it available to everyone as open-source. Additionally, the proper legal wrangling is in place so the Nouveau driver could become a conforming Khronos adopter under the X.Org Foundation without any associated costs/fees with Nouveau being purely open-source and primarily considered a community driver.

Karol Herbst, a longtime Nouveau contributor who joined Red Hat at the end of last year, has been focused on Nouveau NIR/SPIR-V/compute support but recently spent some time on the OpenGL CTS for hitting OpenGL 4.5 compliance.

With 13 outstanding patches, Karol is able to get the OpenGL 4.5 required list to pass without failing. But some tests are still failing randomly, which need to be tracked down. Of those 13 patches though, some of them are still in work-in-progress quality and not likely to be merged to Mesa straight-away.

But if you are interested in getting close as possible right now to OpenGL 4.5 with Nouveau, there are the patches on Mesa-dev. Granted, with most hardware supported under the NVC0 driver there will be slow performance due to the Nouveau kernel DRM driver's support for re-clocking being quite poor at the moment.