OpenGL 4.6 Released With Vulkan/SPIR-V Ingestion, Parallel Shader Compiles & Finally AF

[phoronix]

Phoronix: OpenGL 4.6 Released With Vulkan/SPIR-V Ingestion, Parallel Shader Compiles & Finally AF

As we have been anticipating and hinting at for weeks/months, a new formal update to OpenGL has been in the works and it's officially out today. Meet OpenGL 4.6! This is a pretty significant update and internally they had the debate whether to call it OpenGL 5.0, but here we are with OpenGL 4.6 that features Vulkan/SPIR-V extensions and more. The good news is the open-source Mesa drivers aren't too far out from OpenGL 4.6 support, at least RadeonSI and Intel.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=24983

[abu_shawarib]

This will probably be the first time open source drivers will get support briefly after a new spec release?

[M@GOid]

Is there some game that uses a OpenGL 4.6 feature?

[schmidtbag]

Any idea when mesamatrix will be updated for this?

I'm slightly curious which extensions weren't implemented in 4.6, and why.

[treba]

Sounds great! But what about bindless textures? I thought it's one of the most used AZDO extensions.

Edit: ok, if I get it right, not all OGL4 hardware can support bindless textures, so only in OGL 5 it can become part of core.

[tga.d]

Any idea when mesamatrix will be updated for this?

I'm slightly curious which extensions weren't implemented in 4.6, and why.

mesamatrix just parses the features.txt file in the mesa tree into a nice GUI, so presumably whenever a patch updating that file goes through. I don't see anything in the mailing list yet, though I can't imagine it will be long before it is.

[swoorup]

what is the point of OGL releases now? Can't they built OpenGL atop vulkan and focus on vulkan instead?

[duby229]

My impression was that there was a few features and extensions they wanted in an official capacity. There aren't any games out there that need GL4.6 yet, but when drivers become available I wouldn't be surprised to see a few games updated to make use of some of the extensions they can use.

Try to understand that right now there are literally thousands of Linux apps and games that rely on some version of OpenGL and many of the games can probably use at least a few of the new features. While it's true that the future -is- Vulkan, It's also equally true the past -is- OpenGL. Many, many titles already exist.

[Gusar]

mesamatrix just parses the features.txt file in the mesa tree into a nice GUI, so presumably whenever a patch updating that file goes through. I don't see anything in the mailing list yet, though I can't imagine it will be long before it is.

Indeed didn't take long, patch is now on the mailing list: https://lists.freedesktop.org/archiv...ly/164799.html

Anyway, interesting that shader_group_vote is there, but not shader_ballot. The int64 dependency got in the way? Well, at least that means there's a high chance Haswell will get full 4.6 support

[eydee]

Do we know minimum hardware specs on which it will be implemented? Everything that still has official driver support? Nvidia seems to have the beta driver for Fermi and newer.