Intel's Mesa Driver Now Enables OpenGL 4.5

Written by Michael Larabel in Mesa on 14 October 2016 at 08:51 PM EDT. 19 Comments
MESA
Intel's Mesa OpenGL driver now officially enables OpenGL 4.5 support for Broadwell "Gen 8" hardware and newer.

Intel's Mesa driver has supported all OpenGL 4.5 extensions for a number of days now, but it didn't formally expose OpenGL 4.5 as the version string due to not yet passing the conformance test suite from Khronos.

But this commit on Friday night reads, "i965: Enable OpenGL 4.5. Everything is in place. There are still conformance issues to sort out, but we may as well turn it on in master."

With the Mesa branching this weekend for the next release due out in November, this means there will be OpenGL 4.5 for Intel! Assuming of course you are on Broadwell or newer... It remains to be seen if RadeonSI or Nouveau NVC0 will flip on OpenGL 4.5 for this next Mesa release while they also implement all GL 4.4/4.5 extensions. (For those expressing concern about the Khronos conformance test suite for GL 4.4/4.5, the advertised costs, etc, I've got some clarification from Khronos and the concerns are basically a non-issue for Mesa. I'll write up more details in the morning.)
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