OpenGL 4.4's ARB_clear_texture Hits Nouveau Drivers

The open-source Nouveau Gallium3D drivers have tacked on support for another OpenGL 4.4 extension.

Thanks to the continued work by Ilia Mirkin, Mesa 11.1 will have support in the NV50 and NVC0 Gallium3D drivers for the ARB_clear_texture extension. This extension was only made available today to Gallium3D drivers while previously this extension was supported by the classic Intel driver. The commit landing the Nouveau support is here.

The ARB_clear_texture extension is explained in detail via the OpenGL.org registry.

The NV50 Gallium3D driver for pre-Fermi GPUs is still a ways out from supporting OpenGL 4.1 while the NVC0 driver for GeForce GTX 400 (Fermi) and newer drivers remains at OpenGL 4.1. The NVC0 driver is blocked by ARB_shader_atomic_counters and ARB_shader_image_load_store for having OpenGL 4.2 support, which is the same as the Radeon drivers. Numerous OpenGL 4.3 extensions are left to be implemented as well before the developers will begin worrying about OpenGL 4.4 compliance, for which there is a ton of work remaining, but at least now they are one step closer.