Mesa's Zink Driver Now Supports OpenGL VR Extensions

For anyone still relying upon virtual reality (VR) applications written for the OpenGL API rather than the Vulkan API that has been dominant among VR apps (and other modern games / software) for years, the Mesa code and in particular the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver now supports the OpenGL VR (OVR) extensions.

AMD's Marek Olšák and Valve's Mike Blumenkrantz has pushed the OpenGL VR support over the finish line with enabling the OVR_multiview, OVR_multiview2, and OVR_multiview_multisampled_render_to_texture extensions.

These extensions were started by Oculus developers -- including John Carman at the time -- back in 2018 along with input from NVIDIA, Google, Sony, ARM, Qualcomm, Imagination, and others. OVR_multiview allows for more efficient multi-view rendering by allowing multiple elements of a 2D texture array to be rendered simultaneously. OVR_multiview_multisampled_render_to_texture brings multi-view rendering for EXT_multisampled_render_to_texture.

Again, these now are six year old OpenGL extensions and most modern VR software has since moved on to using the Vulkan API, but in any case the Mesa 24.3 driver is now plumbed for them and working with the Zink driver.

More details on this support for those interested via Mike's blog.