Nouveau Fermi Gets OpenGL 4.2 Support Flipped On

For users of Nouveau's NVC0 Gallium3D driver with a GeForce 400/500 "Fermi" graphics card, there is now OpenGL 4.2 compliance.

Last month NVC0 received OpenGL 4.2 for newer Kepler GPUs while the work was finished up recently by Samuel Pitoiset for taking Fermi to OpenGL 4.2. The last extension needed was ARB_shader_image_load_store and that landed in Mesa Git this morning for the GF100/Fermi hardware. Just this morning the updated patch series was sent on Mesa-dev.

Thus GLSL 420 is now exposed rather than 410 / GL 4.10. This Fermi OpenGL 4.2 support will be found in the next Mesa release due out in June.

This OpenGL 4.2 support may allow more Linux games to run on this open-source driver for GeForce 400/500 series, but considering there Fermi re-clocking support isn't in a state like Kepler, you can expect slow performance and likely would still be better off using the proprietary driver for a while.