Intel Is Insanely Close To Showing Off OpenGL 4.5 With Their Mesa Driver

Written by Michael Larabel in Intel on 16 June 2016 at 05:52 PM EDT. 36 Comments
INTEL
It could really be any day now that the Intel i965 Mesa DRI driver exposes OpenGL 4.5 support!

Hitting Mesa Git today is now GL_ARB_ES3_1_compatibility support as needed by OpenGL 4.5. This extension basically signifies the OpenGL driver is capable of OpenGL ES 3.1, which the Intel Mesa driver has already supported for some time. This GL_ARB_ES3_1_compatibility extension was the last remaining item needed for OpenGL 4.5 and is flipped on if using Broadwell hardware or newer and OpenGL Compute Shaders are enabled.

This now just leaves the finishing up of ARB_enhanced_layouts, a OpenGL 4.4 requirement, until all major work will be finished on OpenGL 4.4 and 4.5. Timothy Arceri and others have already been working on the remaining ARB_enhanced_layouts work so now it's just a matter of when it's all finished up, reviewed, and merged.

It's looking almost definitively that the Mesa 12.0+1 release due out in September will have OpenGL 4.5 while the Mesa 12.0 coming out this month will have just missed the milestone due to its code branching at the end of May. This Intel OpenGL 4.5 support is currently just for Intel Broadwell hardware and newer, but Haswell support is still listed as a TODO item for hopeful completion sometime in the not too distant future.

Nouveau NVC0 isn't too far behind with its OpenGL 4.4~4.5 support followed by RadeonSI, so hopefully we'll see these other open-source OpenGL drivers also hit this OpenGL milestone by September.
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