ATI Radeon R600 Mesa Classic Driver Can Do OpenGL 2.1

Written by Michael Larabel in Radeon on 9 August 2010 at 03:37 PM EDT. 20 Comments
RADEON
As many people have been quick to report out today in the forums, on Phoronix IRC, and via email, the ATI R600 Mesa DRI driver for the Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 series graphics cards now properly advertises OpenGL 2.1 / GL Shading Language 1.20 support.

Today's committed work doesn't exactly bring any support breakthroughs with the R600 DRI driver, but after the developers were testing the driver they found most of the OpenGL 2.1 / GLSL 1.20 tests were passing fine and thus decided to set the flag officially enabling GLSL 1.20 (via this commit) while most of the OpenGL 2.1 extensions have been supported by this open-source driver for a period of time. This change though may help those with Wine and running other games/applications that prefer using OGL v2.1 / GLSL v1.20.

There's already been OpenGL 2.1 support for ATI Radeon R300 through R500 ASICs when using the R300g Gallium3D driver with the Mesa state tracker, but this is good news for those using the R600 classic Mesa driver. While the R600 Gallium3D driver isn't up to the same point as its classic Mesa counterpart, it hit the glxgears milestone late last month and since then gained OpenGL texture support and mip-map and face culling support along with other capabilities.

All of this work will be present in the upcoming Mesa 7.9 release.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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