R600 Gallium3D Shader Image Support Lands, Other R600g Patches Pending

Written by Michael Larabel in Mesa on 17 November 2017 at 01:10 AM EST. 5 Comments
MESA
As a follow-up to OpenGL 4.2 Support Could Soon Land For AMD Cayman GPUs On R600g, the patches have landed in Mesa 17.4-dev Git! Plus other R600g patches are on the mailing list for review.

These shader image support patches for R600g expose OpenGL's ARB_shader_image_size and ARB_shader_image_load_store for Radeon HD 5000/6000 series. In the process, this ends up taking Radeon HD 6900 "Cayman" GPUs to having OpenGL 4.2 compliance from 4.1 with the shader image support having been the last blocker. Other GPUs on R600g remain at OpenGL 3.3 due to lacking FP64 support, as outlined more extensively in that previous article.

David Airlie merged the shader image patches a short time ago into Mesa Git. Meanwhile, on Mesa-dev he's published R600g work for supporting the ARB_shader_storage_buffer_object extension as needed by OpenGL ES 3.1 and OpenGL 4.3.

With the AMD developers being busy with current and future GPU support on Linux, it will be interesting to see how much further David Airlie and the community take the mature R600g driver.

A convenient look at the R600 Gallium3D OpenGL state can be found via MesaMatrix.net but keep in mind while R600g supports from ATI Radeon HD 2000 (R600) through AMD Radeon HD 6000 (Northern Islands) graphics cards, some extensions/levels are only supported for certain generations of hardware.
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