Mesa 18.2 Git Lands RadeonSI OpenGL 4.4 Compatibility Profile Support

It was just four days ago that Valve Linux GPU driver developer Timothy Arceri was thinking it could take a while before having OpenGL 4.4 compatibility profile support for RadeonSI, but tonight that milestone is checked off the list.

Yesterday were RadeonSI GL 4.4 compatibility profile patches posted by Arceri after he made a breakthrough in achieving support for this OpenGL revision under the compatibility mode that allows GL's deprecated functionality to be utilized.

In the process he was able to confirm these patches now allow the Windows-only Wolfenstein and Doom games with OpenGL under Wine to behave correctly under RadeonSI. Additionally, the Dyling Light game that makes use of the OpenGL compatibility profile mode is also running without workarounds.

Now as of Friday evening, these GL 4.4 compatibility profile patches have been merged, culminating with enabling it by default. This big step forward for RadeonSI's OpenGL compatibility profile will be found in Mesa 18.2 due out in August, which is a big upgrade from OpenGL 3.1 compatibility as found in Mesa 18.1. Of course, the OpenGL core profile remains at OpenGL 4.5.

The OpenGL compatibility profile support in the closed-source AMD Linux driver "AMDGPU-PRO" was one of the remaining advantages of that driver, but that now is becoming a moot point -- not to mention RadeonSI offering much better performance.