Christmas Miracle: Intel Mesa Driver Tessellation For Ivy Bridge & Haswell

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Christmas Miracle: Intel Mesa Driver Tessellation For Ivy Bridge & Haswell

A few days ago Intel landed OpenGL tessellation support in their open-source driver as required by OpenGL 4. However, this initial implementation was limited to support Intel's Broadwell hardware and newer. With new patches, that is now changing...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Intel-Tessellation-Gen7

[smitty3268]

Intel is actually very close to finishing off full GL4.5 support. I wasn't aware just how close they really are. I bet it happens sometime in 2016. Maybe even by summer unless the Vulkan side of things takes everyone's attention away from GL.

GL4.0/4.1:

• fp64 (should be close)

GL4.3:

• internalformat_query2 (is pretty close)
• ARB_robust_buffer_access_behavior (checkbox?)

GL4.4:

• enhanced_layouts (in progress)
• query_buffer_object (todo)
• texture_stencil8 (core mesa is done)

GL4.5:

• ES3_1_compatibility (should be basically done?)
• cull_distance (todo?)
• KHR_robust_buffer_access_behavior (checkbox?)
• KHR_robustness (checkbox?)

Also, GLES support is fairly close as well.
ES3.1:

• done? - not sure what's still missing

ES3.2:

• lots of stuff, but mostly variants of what's already done for GL4

All the robustness stuff, AFAIK, is basically just checking that your driver doesn't blow up when bad stuff is fed to it (so that enabling WebGL is safe). So users could just flip those on at any time without worrying about an application relying on it, if the security checks take a while to complete.

[Danny3]

Wow, this is great
Merry Christmas to everyone!

[Gusar]

That was a fun message to read . Congrats Ken for figuring it out!

@debinaxfce: Celeron N2830 is Baytrail. It contains a gen7 GPU, same as Ivy Bridge (but with a lower Execution Unit count than Ivy Bridge).

[oibaf]

Will tesselation be possible on Sandy Bridge?
EDIT: it looks it's not supported on Sandy Bridge.

[carewolf]

What I hate is writing commit messages when the fix comes from flailing around in the dark.. "Changing A to B, because that works..."

[uid313]

Anything on Linux uses tessellation?

[Ericg]

Anything on Linux uses tessellation?

Don't some of the new AAA games use it? Like BS:I?

[CrystalGamma]

Anything on Linux uses tessellation?

Even if no-one currently does (and people who want it probably don't use any Intel GPUs but Iris Pro), there is now one less reason not to port to/use Linux

[Raven3x7]

"Ivy Bridge & Haswell" = 22nm and 14 nm intel cpus. (for non intel religion fanatics). We have a laptop with Intel Celeron N2830. From intel site you will not find family names but line width is there. From wikipedia you can find intel cpu family names.

Actually both Ivy Bridge and Haswell are 22nm chips. Intel has been releasing 2 designs per node for a while now. First they release what is for the most part a shrink of their previous processor(Sandy to Ivy Bridge), then they release a new design (Ivy Bridge to Haswell). Recently, they've started releasing an optimized/binned version of the latter chip(e.g. Devils Canyon and most likely Kaby Lake) to close the gap between process shrinks, as it's taking them longer now.