Nouveau Advances For OpenGL 3.2 Support

Ilia Mirkin has published an exciting set of 19 patches to the Nouveau's NV50 Gallium3D driver that up the OpenGL support for this open-source NVIDIA graphics driver.

The 19 patches published just a short time ago add support for OpenGL Geometry Shaders, ARB_texture_multisample support, enabling of OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL) 1.50 support, enabling ARB_seamless_cube_map for all hardware, and other changes needed to advertise OpenGL 3.2 support.

The OpenGL geometry shaders support in Nouveau is based upon other work done within Mesa and previously by Bryan Cain and Christoph Bumiller. There's still a few GS Piglit regression tests not passing, but with these patches it appears that there's OpenGL 3.2 support available within the Nouveau NV50 Gallium3D driver.

The NV50 Gallium3D driver is responsible for the open-source user-space driver support from the GeForce 8 series through the GeForce 300 series. It's great to see Nouveau finally catching up with its OpenGL compliance and hopefully these patches will soon be merged to mainline Mesa for the 10.1/11.0 release. The only other Mesa/Gallium3D driver with full OpenGL 3.2 compliance right now is the i965 DRI driver.

OpenGL 3.3 support could be coming soon to Nouveau as well with only a few more TODO items left before the NV50 driver is in compliance with the last GL3 specification. The NVC0 Gallium3D driver for GeForce 400 "Fermi" series support and newer is also making good progress on its OpenGL 3.x support. The current support matrix can be found via the GL3.txt documentation.

The current OpenGL 3.2 patches for NV50 Nouveau can be found on the Mesa-dev list.