AMD R600g Catches Up With Another GL 4.3 Extension

Thanks to Glenn Kennard, the R600 Gallium3D driver now supports another OpenGL 4.3 extension that was already available for RadeonSI, Intel i965, Nouveau NV50/NVC0, and even the Softpipe and LLVMpipe drivers.

The extension that R600g has now caught up with is support for ARB_texture_view as needed by the OpenGL 4.3 specification.

The ARB_texture_view specification is explained at the OpenGL.org registry. "This extension allows a texture's data store to be "viewed" in multiple ways, either reinterpreting the data format/type as a different format/type with the same element size, or by clamping the mipmap level range or array slice range. The goals of this extension are to avoid having these alternate views become shared mutable containers of shared mutable objects, and to add the views to the API in a minimally invasive way."

In the latest Mesa Git code, R600g still lacks OpenGL 4.0 support due to ARB_tessellation_shader and then after that is nearly caught up with the RadeonSI driver for OpenGL 4 extensions. However, not all graphics cards supported by the R600g driver will be able to handle all of the GL4 extensions and for some are currently limited in the Git code to just a few select GPU generations.