NV_fill_rectangle Coming To Gallium3D/Nouveau

Red Hat developer Lyude Paul is working on OpenGL NV_fill_rectangle support for Gallium3D and the Nouveau driver.

Lyude has published a set of six patches for adding GL_NV_fill_rectangle support to Gallium3D and wires it up in the Nouveau NVC0 driver for GM200+ hardware.

As explained by the OpenGL registry, "This extension adds a new PolygonMode setting where a triangle is rasterized by computing and filling its axis-aligned screen-space bounding box, disregarding the actual triangle edges. This can be useful for drawing a rectangle without being split into two triangles with an internal edge. It is also useful to minimize the number of primitives that need to be drawn, particularly for a user-interface."

NV_fill_rectangle isn't currently part of any released version of the OpenGL specification. Interesting to see Red Hat working on this vendor extension as I am not familiar with any big open-source user of this extension, but appears to be in use by some games.

The NV_fill_rectangle patches for Gallium/Nouveau can be found on Mesa-dev.