All Gallium3D Drivers Getting ASTC Compression Support, RadeonSI Hits OpenGL ES 3.2

The latest notable patch series by prolific Mesa contributor Marek Olšák of AMD is on allowing ASTC texture compression support for all Gallium3D drivers.

This means of universal ASTC texture compression for all Gallium3D hardware drivers not implementing the capability within the GPU hardware is for decompressing the textures on the CPU to a supported uncompressed format prior to uploading it to the GPU.

The Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC) is a lossy, royalty-free texture compression algorithm originally devised by ARM and AMD as an alternative to the likes of S3TC and ETC2. ASTC has been part of OpenGL and OpenGL ES the past few years.

With these universal Gallium patches, RadeonSI now is able to support KHR_texture_compression_astc_ldr and ANDROID_extension_pack_es31a. With those extensions complete, the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver is now able to advertise support for OpenGL ES 3.2.

This fallback support for ASTC does pass all necessary conformance tests. The patches for now can be found on Mesa-dev. Marek is planning on landing these patches in the next day or two so they will be part of the upcoming Mesa 18.2 release, complete with RadeonSI OpenGL ES 3.2 support.