Intel Lands Compute Shader Support In Mesa!

Intel's Jorden Justen has landed the long in-progress ARB_compute_shader support inside Mesa. This compute shader support is available for Ivy Bridge "Gen 7" graphics and newer.

As of this morning in Mesa Git is working compute shader support for the Intel DRI driver that's needed for OpenGL 4.3 as well as OpenGL ES 3.1 support. OpenGL compute shaders are a big deal and needed for some modern games and will open up this open-source Intel driver to being able to handle new workloads.

While Intel has compute shader support now, their i965 DRI driver doesn't advertise even OpenGL 4.0 support yet due to the missing tessellation shader support and FP64 support. However, once those two extensions are done along with ARB_vertex_attrib_64bit, Intel's driver will be at OpenGL 4.2.

While Intel has been slower than Nouveau and Radeon at OpenGL 4 support, they have been focusing more on the GL bits that carry over to OpenGL ES for the mobile space. With compute shader support landed, Intel should nearly be done with OpenGL ES 3.1 support and will be the first Mesa/Gallium3D driver to have this support.