Panfrost Gallium3D Flips On AFBC For Bifrost GPUs

Adding to the long list of changes for Mesa 21.0 is the Panfrost Gallium3D driver that provides open-source OpenGL for Arm Mali graphics hardware now supporting Arm Frame Buffer Compression (AFBC) for Bifrost GPUs.

The Panfrost Gallium3D driver has enabled Arm Frame-Buffer Compression on 2D arrays and 3D textures for Bifrost (or just Bifrost v7 for 3D textures). The AFBC support isn't there for the Midgard GPUs also supported by Panfrost.

Arm Frame Buffer Compression provides lossless image compression designed to provide "significant" system bandwidth and power savings. Arm reports that AFBC can provide up to 50% bandwidth savings and in turn help reduce SoC energy consumption.

The support landed this week with this merge request. Mesa 21.0 stable should be out in March. This AFBC support in Panfrost Gallium3D follows AFBC support in the kernel worked on in recent years.