Intel Compute Shaders Appear Nearly Ready For Mainline Mesa

OpenGL Compute Shader support appears about ready for the open-source Intel i965 Mesa DRI driver!

Patches for Intel compute shader support in Mesa have been floating around for a while under development, but a Phoronix reader pointed that with this latest Git branch the code appears about ready.

Jordan Justen at Intel has been one of the main developers involved in the "CS" support and with the end of the branch he does mark the ARB_compute_shader support as complete. Now it's just a matter of whatever review/testing and finishing touches before this code is mainlined.

Compute shaders aren't needed until OpenGL 4.3 compliance while Intel's driver doesn't even yet have OpenGL 4.0 support. However, making compute shaders more of a priority for them has been due to their focus on accomplishing OpenGL ES 3.1 compliance. Compute shaders are present in OpenGL ES 3.1. Once the compute shaders code merges to master, the only extension left for hitting GLES 3.1 on Intel is ARB_arrays_of_arrays, which is the extension that was started and has long been in development by Timothy Arceri.

Those unfamiliar with the OpenGL compute shader capabilities can see the extension specification.