Intel's Mesa Driver Gets Some Exciting Changes

With Mesa 10.0 planned for release this month and to be branched from Git master this coming week, a number of exciting commits landed on Friday for Intel's open-source Mesa DRI graphics driver.

Among the highlights for the committed work on Friday include:

- A CSE GLSL pass yielding Unigine Engine performance improvements with this commit.

- This commit does some i965 fragment shader optimizations that can help a lot of Steam games with reducing the number of generated shader instructions. There were also similar commits for shader optimizations.

- Mesa received support for the GL_ARB_sample_shading extension. In the end, GL_ARB_sample_shading was enabled for Intel Sandy Bridge and newer. Details on the extension can be found via OpenGL.org.

The numerous code commits from Friday for the Intel Mesa driver are on top of many other new Mesa 10.0 features and OpenGL performance improvements.