S3TC remains the most common form of texture compression relied upon by video game developers and others, but it remains a legal mess for open-source graphics drivers. ETC2 texture compression isn't faced by legal issues but was only mandated by OpenGL ES 3.0 / OpenGL 4.3, which makes it less well adopted. Meanwhile, in looking forward to the future, ASTC is the royalty-free next-gen texture compression solution that's backed by the Khronos Group. Intel's forthcoming Skylake hardware will make ASTC a much more widespread reality.
Among other OpenGL 4.x extensions, one of the more recent additions to OpenGL being tackled by open-source developers is ARB_shader_storage_buffer_object.
20 May 2015 - ARB_shader_storage_buffer_object - 1 Comment
As planned, Mesa 10.6 has been branched and due to lacking OpenGL 4.0 / OpenGL ES 3.1 support, the version will not be bumped to Mesa 11.0. This also now makes Mesa 10.7 officially under development.
For users of the Freedreno Gallium3D driver for having unofficial open-source Qualcomm graphics support, the Adreno 306 is the latest graphics processor now supported.
Most often when talking of new OpenGL 4 extensions in Mesa it tends to be regarding the Intel Mesa driver given they're the company investing the most into the Linux graphics stack, followed by the Radeon and Noveau drivers. However, this week in Mesa is some love to the fallback/debugging software rasterizers.
In January of 2014 there was ARB_viewport_array added to the Intel Mesa driver, an extension needed for OpenGL 4.1 compliance, but at the time it was only enabled for Ivy Bridge graphics hardware and newer. Intel has now extended that support back to Sandy Bridge.
For users of "Gallium3D Nine", the state tracker providing Direct3D 9 API support within Mesa, there's a number of fixes that were pushed into Git this morning.
While there's still more work to be done before advertising OpenGL 4.0~4.1 compliance, the Nouveau NVC0 Gallium3D driver is now advertising support for GLSL 410 (4.10), the GL Shading Language version to match OpenGL 4.1.
For the past two years there has been an optional Gallium3D HUD to display various performance-related metrics as an overlay while running OpenGL applications with the Gallium3D drivers. With the latest Mesa Git code, the heads-up display can be a bit more customized.
One of the biggest additions to Mesa so far this year has been the introduction of NIR, the new intermediate representation designed to replace GLSL IR and designed by a bright student fresh out of high school.
Those paying attention to the mailing list may have seen the patches yesterday that surfaced from an independent developer for implementing ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 with Intel's graphics driver for Gen 7+ hardware. Unfortunately, it was too good to be true.
Following Intel's development of NIR as the new intermediate representation for Mesa and the Raspberry Pi graphics driver switching to NIR, the Freedreno Gallum3D driver as the open-source user-space GPU driver for Qualcomm Adreno now has NIR support too.
While the Radeon, Nouveau, and LLVMpipe/Softpipe drivers have already supported the OpenGL ARB_clip_control extension, the Intel (i965) driver now finally supports this OpenGL 4.5 extension too.
While Mesa is talked about as being able to be built for Google's Android operating system to run these open-source graphics drivers on Android devices with OpenGL ES support, in reality there's a lot left to be desired.
Earlier this week I shared some new OS X 10.10 vs. Fedora 21 vs. Ubuntu 15.04 benchmarks, which were quite interesting and Linux ended up having the upper-hand on this new Mac Mini with an Intel "Haswell" CPU sporting Iris Graphics. For those interested in more cross-OS benchmarks with Intel Iris Graphics, here's some additional results.
While Mesa still doesn't officially support the OpenGL 4.0 specification, the Direct State Access (DSA) extension of OpenGL 4.5 has been worked on quite a bit so far and the Mesa implementation is nearly done.
A patch series published earlier this month enables the GL_AMD_performance_monitor OpenGL performance profiling extension for the major Gallium3D drivers.
19 March 2015 - GL_AMD_performance_monitor - Add A Comment
Marek Olšák of AMD has landed a number of improvements into mainline Mesa for the RadeonSI Gallium3D open-source graphics driver for benefiting Radeon HD 7000 series graphics processors and newer.
16 March 2015 - RadeonSI Improvements - 3 Comments
Emil Velikov announced the much anticipated release of Mesa 10.5 this evening, which is the quarterly update to this open-source (primarily Linux) user-space graphics stack.
LunarG, the consulting company around open-source Linux graphics drivers, is one of the organizations involved heavily with the new Vulkan graphics API and SPIR-V intermediate representation. Thanks to their involvement, they already have out an initial SPIR-V front-end to their open-source LunarGLASS Mesa project.
For Ubuntu Linux users who haven't tried the Vivid Verbet Beta 1 release yet, you'll be pleased to know that Ubuntu 15.04 is riding off Mesa 10.5 for having the latest open-source graphics drivers.
Rob Clark continues making great progress on his Freedreno Gallium3D graphics driver for providing open-source support for Qualcomm's Adreno graphics hardware.
A few weeks back at FOSDEM was a presentation by Luc Verhaegen on the Tamil Driver, which is focused on bringing open-source graphics driver support to ARM's Mali T-Series and is the successor to his former Lima driver for older Mali graphics hardware.
With Mesa 10.5 recently having been branched and Mesa 10.6 now officially under development, I ran some quick comparison benchmarks today to see how the latest Mesa 10.4 stable series is comparing to Mesa 10.6-devel Git for an Intel Core i3 "Broadwell" NUC with HD Graphics 5500.
14 February 2015 - Broadwell NUC OpenGL - Add A Comment
For those that have been having problems using Gallium3D VDPAU recently, this video decoding should be fixed up in the latest Mesa 10.6-devel Git code and it will also be back-ported for Mesa 10.5.
Mesa Git master was branched into Mesa 10.5 this weekend and the latest Git code then bumped to Mesa 10.6-devel. While Mesa 10.5 is a step closer to being released, officially it still only supports OpenGL 3.3.
Last weekend at FOSDEM 2015 there was a status update concerning Gallium3D Nine, the Direct3D 9 state tracker that runs Windows games in conjunction with Wine.
A Google engineer is still working on his virtual GEM driver that will benefit the performance of Mesa's software rasterizer for increasing the performance when not running on real graphics hardware.
For those wondering what else Kristian Høgsberg is working on in his post-Wayland days, after tackling initial Skylake enablement in Mesa his latest achievement is a new Mesa performance patch.
