Qualcomm A4xx Gallium3D Support Takes Shape

Those with Qualcomm Adreno A4xx series graphics hardware, the open-source 3D support is coming along nicely.

Last month on Phoronix was the surprising news that Qualcomm began contributing to Freedreno's MSM DRM driver. The work done by Qualcomm's Innovation Center was adding support for the latest-generation Adreno 4xx hardware to this open-source DRM/KMS driver. Rob Clark, the one behind the Freedreno project, complemented that work by getting the A4xx support working in the Gallium3D driver.

Rob has spent time lately on getting the Adreno 4xx support working and as of this week he's got textures working and other features for getting the OpenGL ES 2.0 gears running along with some of glmark2. Rob says the support so far is working fast and he committed it to mainline Mesa Git following the Mesa 10.4 branching to give him more time to improve the support before it appears in released form.

Find out more about the Freedreno A4xx support via Rob's blog post. The Adreno 420 has a DirectX 11.2 capable 3D pipeline, OpenCL 1.2 full profile support, improved texturing, improved ROPs, and numerous other improvements over the A3xx series. The 4xx family supports OpenGL ES 3.1 (compared to ES 3.0 with the 3xx series). The Adreno 405/418/420/430 are currently found in the Snapdragon 610/615/805/808/810 SoCs.