BioShock Infinite Is Almost Working Fine For Mesa Drivers

With Mesa quickly finishing up OpenGL 4.0~4.2 support and even some OpenGL 4.5 extensions, more Steam Linux games are becoming playable on the open-source drivers.

Open-source Mesa/Gallium3D driver users into Linux gaming can soon rejoice for another playable title: BioShock Infinite. BioShock Infinite was released for Linux back in March and required OpenGL 4.1~4.2 support, thereby making it off-limits to the Mesa/Gallium3D drivers of the time.

The support is nearly all squared away, especially with Nouveau now advertising OpenGL 4.1. However, there is one issue: glCopyImageSubData used even if GL_ARB_copy_image is not available. Blocking the Nouveau driver from running the game is lack of GL_ARB_copy_image support. Fortunately, there is some work for ARB_copy_image happening right now and ideally could see a rough implementation land in Gallium3D prior to the next release in September.

Once BioShock Infinite is running on the open Intel/AMD/Nouveau drivers, there will certainly be some fresh benchmarks since it's a benchmark-friendly game.

What OpenGL 4.x game(s) are you looking forward to see running on Mesa/Gallium3D? Let us know by commenting on this article. Personally I'm quite excited for Metro 2033 / Last Light Redux on these open-source drivers.