Yet Another OpenGL 4.5 Extension Is Nearing Completion In Mesa

Written by Michael Larabel in Mesa on 25 May 2015 at 10:00 PM EDT. 24 Comments
MESA
While Mesa still is only officially at OpenGL 3.3 compliance, a lot of OpenGL 4.x extensions continue to be worked on by open-source developers interested in advancing the free software graphics drivers.

The latest GL4 extension nearing reality is GL_ARB_cull_distance. Yesterday Tobias Klausmann posted an "RFC" patch-set implementing the OpenGL 4.5's ARB_cull_distance extension for Mesa. The tentative patch series can be found here and provides the GLSL support, the necessary code within Gallium3D, and implements it within Nouveau's NVC0 Gallium3D driver.

As explained by the OpenGL.org Registry, "This extension adds a new GLSL gl_CullDistance shader output, similar to gl_ClipDistance, but used for whole primitive culling. This new stage in the pipeline is added as part of the primitive clipping stage."

One could hope these patches will be ironed out for Mesa 10.7 in September, which ideally will be known as Mesa 11.0 should OpenGL 4.0+ compliance be reached.
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