13 Patches Published That Effectively Bring RadeonSI To OpenGL 4.5

Written by Michael Larabel in Radeon on 7 October 2016 at 04:29 PM EDT. 40 Comments
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Back on Wednesday I wrote about how RadeonSI and Nouveau NVC0 completed their OpenGL 4.5 extension changes but were still being held up from exposing OpenGL 4.4 due to the incomplete ARB_enhanced_layouts extension. Well, that is about to change with 13 patches published today that effectively finish it up.

Nicolai Hähnle of AMD spent his Friday finishing up the ARB_enhanced_layouts support for the Mesa state tracker / Gallium3D drivers. It's confirmed to be working for at least RadeonSI, Softpipe, and LLVMpipe G3D drivers with these new patches. It will also hopefully work with Nouveau NVC0, bringing this open-source NVIDIA driver to the same OGL 4.4/4.5 support level.

While finishing up ARB_enhanced_layouts does mark all OpenGL 4.4 -- and all 4.5 extensions already -- being done, they may not expose OpenGL 4.5 quite yet. Similar to the Intel driver, they may only expose OpenGL 4.4 for the time being until ensuring their driver is fully conformant even though all of the extensions are complete. Nicolai noted, "Finally, as a little addition, the last patch turns on GLSL 4.50 for radeonsi. All the bits for OpenGL 4.5 are implemented with this series, though we do have to be careful about really claiming support in the release because we haven't done the whole CTS results submission dance (and there are still a bunch of genuine failures as well)."

So Nouveau and RadeonSI are about to join the Intel i965 driver in implementing all extensions up through OpenGL 4.5, but OpenGL 4.4 might be what's officially advertised until they go through the process of ensuring the driver is fully compliant with the OpenGL conformance test suite (CTS).

Hopefully these 13 patches will be reviewed and land in time for the Mesa 13.0 branching next Friday. Quite an exciting time, one day after the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver made it into mainline Mesa.

Also keep in mind there are still dozens of other newer OpenGL extensions not part of OpenGL 4.5 officially that have yet to be implemented in Mesa. There are extensions like ARB_bindless_texture, ARB_shader_ballot, ARB_sparse_texture, etc. Some of the yet-to-be-implemented OpenGL extensions are critical for AZDO techniques -- approaching zero driver overhead.
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