Mesa Patches For Bringing Intel Haswell To OpenGL 4.2

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mesa Patches For Bringing Intel Haswell To OpenGL 4.2

Igalia developers have been doing a lot of work this past week from seeing their FP64 Haswell patches merged, issuing new Ivy Bridge FP64 patches for testing, Float64 support for the Intel Vulkan driver, and related work. The newest from Juan Suarez Romero on behalf of Igalian developers are the 11 patches needed for taking Intel's Mesa driver for Haswell to the OpenGL 4.2 milestone...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Haswell-OpenGL-4.2-Patches

[axfelix]

Obviously, they won't dramatically improve performance to the point that new big-budget titles can be played, but they're still appreciated. I've had to lock package versions of a couple emulators (yabause and ppsspp) and create a special launcher with Mesa environment variable overrides for Divinity Original Sin to get them all running on my Haswell graphics notebook -- which they do perfectly with the relevant workarounds, so simply doing the work to ensure Haswell reports itself as compliant w/ modern GL apps moving forward is still a big deal. Particularly since subsequent Intel chipsets haven't necessarily been exciting enough to motivate upgrades and not everyone wants a device in discrete-GPU form factors. Plus I think the Windows Haswell driver is stuck at 4.1 or 4.2 so it'll be nice to see Linux go to 4.5 as it did for Broadwell

[Veerappan]

I'm mostly wanting GL 4.3+ because of the games that require it (instead of doing the appropriate extension checks for previous versions), not necessarily for the new features.

My haswell laptop doesn't need the fastest GL performance, but I would at least like for things to launch in the first place so I can attempt to turn down the graphics settings to a playable level.

[AJenbo]

Hashwell on Windows is OpenGL 4.3 as of September 2014. Hashwell is currently also the only Intel GPU with a lower GL version on Linux then on Windows, so this should make a pretty cool mile stone as well.

[tildearrow]

Hashwell on Windows is OpenGL 4.3 as of September 2014. Hashwell is currently also the only Intel GPU with a lower GL version on Linux then on Windows, so this should make a pretty cool mile stone as well.

Ivy Bridge too (4.0 on Windows, 3.3 on Linux).

[AJenbo]

Ivy Bridge too (4.0 on Windows, 3.3 on Linux).

Technically true, but I was including the patches that are already in review for 4.0 on Ivy

[edoantonioco]

hopefully they will also proper finish the vulkan implementation on haswell.
Also, this card is fast enough to play a lot of games, including wii games through dolphin, even with the vulkan renderer (which is half the speed of opengl)

Hashwell on Windows is OpenGL 4.3 as of September 2014. Hashwell is currently also the only Intel GPU with a lower GL version on Linux then on Windows, so this should make a pretty cool mile stone as well.

Also, mesa supports vulkan, something than isnt happening on intel on windows. But this is overall bad news, we need vulkan to be more spreaded.

[AJenbo]

Intel is still working on a vulkan drive for gen6 on Windows afaik

[schmidtbag]

Also, mesa supports vulkan, something than isnt happening on intel on windows. But this is overall bad news, we need vulkan to be more spreaded.

Intel probably isn't focused that much on Vulkan since it doesn't really have too many advantages for their IGPs. There are 2 primary benefits to Vulkan: easier implementation (compared to OpenGL) and less CPU overhead. Considering how weak Intel GPUs are, CPU overhead has never really been a big deal. I'm guessing this is also why Intel has been so lazy about completing their OpenGL support - there just aren't enough products out there that use 4.3+ and of the ones that do, Intel's IGPs are too weak to handle them.

Intel also has a tendency to ignore older products regardless of their capabilities. I'm guessing this is intentional, as it forces people to upgrade. Intel needs every excuse they can get to convince people to buy a CPU with a 5% performance improvement.

[DMJC]

Unlocking OpenGL versions on older hardware is still useful for developers that want to target newer OpenGL versions but who only have access to old hardware. This work is important for many people.