OpenGL 4.2 Now Exposed For Intel Haswell On Mesa 17.0

Days ago we mentioned the patches were lining up to get Intel's Haswell to OpenGL 4.2 and this morning those patches have landed in Mesa Git ahead of the branching for the Mesa 17.0 release.

ARB_vertex_attrib_64bit and ARB_shader_precision support have landed, clearing the extensions to take Haswell generation graphics hardware from OpenGL 4.0 to OpenGL 4.2 compliance. This comes just days after Haswell finally got OpenGL 4.0 support with the FP64 support landing. Mesa 17.0 will be exciting for those with these older Intel IGPs going form OpenGL 3.3 to OpenGL 4.2, albeit no major boosts in performance.

The later OpenGL 4.3~4.5 extensions are also complete for Haswell, but only GL 4.2 is flipped on for now until verifying compliance, passing the OpenGL CTS, etc. But even having OpenGL 4.2 for Haswell is a big step forward and will allow more OpenGL Linux games to run with Haswell, at least in theory, the performance may be another story.

This work landed just in time for the Mesa 17.0 branching this weekend and feature freeze while the stable Mesa 17.0 release is expected in February. There's been no changes for the Ivy Bridge support and given the time crunch probably won't see changes for 17.0.

Those curious about Haswell Linux driver performance levels can see our recent Intel IvyBridge/Haswell/Broadwell/Skylake OpenGL & Vulkan Benchmarks On Linux 4.10 + Mesa 13.1.