The OpenGL ARB Shader Storage Buffer Object Lands For Intel Mesa

Intel is getting quite close to having OpenGL ES 3.1 support with their Mesa Linux graphics driver.

ARB_shader_storage_buffer_object is the latest OpenGL / OpenGL ES extension to land for Intel's i965 driver. This shader storage buffer object extension is supported by Intel's Gen7 hardware and newer. This extension is needed for OpenGL 4.3 and is a buffer that allows for bidirectional communication between the CPU and GPU space and perform random access reads/writes and atomic operations on variables within the buffer objects.

This extension has been in the works for several months by Igalia and now it's finally enabled and set for Gen7+.

The Intel driver is now the first to support ARB_shader_storage_buffer_object as needed for OpenGL 4.3. For OpenGL ES 3.1, the Intel driver just has left to support now the ARB_arrays_of_arrays and ARB_compute_shader extensions before it will be in compliant. After that, there's already OpenGL ES 3.2 with more work items.