AMD Radeon Open-Source OpenGL Driver Expands Its Sparse Texture Capabilities

At the end of last year AMD introduced OpenGL sparse texture support into its RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. This functionality for Vega GPUs and newer flipped on ARB_sparse_texture support while now with the very latest Mesa 22.0-devel code ARB_sparse_texture2 is now flipped on too.

ARB_sparse_texture2 updates OpenGL's sparse texture support with further additions by NVIDIA. ARB_sparse_texture2 adds new built-in GLSL texture lookup functions, changes the behavior around reads from uncommitted texture memory, specifies standard virtual page sizes for internal formats used by sparse textures, and support for creating sparse multi-sample and multi-sample array textures.

ARB_sparse_texture2 is outlined in full via the OpenGL Registry. Merged this morning into Mesa 22.0-devel is getting this updated sparse texture support implemented for RadeonSI Gallium3D, again it's limited to Vega/GFX9+ due to hardware capabilities.

See this merge request for the ARB_sparse_texture2 details for RadeonSI.