R600g Geometry Shaders Come For R600/R700

Yesterday I wrote about Geometry Shaders support proposed for the R600 Gallium3D driver, a major OpenGL 3.2 feature and is needed for getting the R600g driver up to par with RadeonSI and the other Mesa/Gallium3D drivers either at or nearing OpenGL 3.3 compliance. Some Phoronix readers expressed outrage that this initial GS support was limited to the Radeon HD 5000 series and newer, but now there's an early patch to provide geometry shaders to older AMD hardware.

David Airlie has published an initial patch that provides OpenGL Geometry Shaders support for R600 (Radeon HD 2000/3000) and R700 (Radeon HD 4000) graphics processors.

This R600/R700 GS work requires one patch to the Gallium3D driver and then also one Linux kernel patch. On the kernel side that likely won't emerge until Linux 3.15.

Those users interested in testing out this work for the older Radeon GPUs with the open-source AMD Linux graphics driver can find the work on the Mesa-dev list.