OpenGL 4.2 Support Could Soon Land For AMD Cayman GPUs On R600g

David Airlie is looking to land OpenGL image support in the R600 Gallium3D driver that would be enabled for Radeon HD 5000 "Evergreen" GPUs and newer. For the HD 6900 "Cayman" GPUs, this would be the last step taking it to exposing OpenGL 4.2 compliance.

These shader image support patches check off ARB_shader_image_size / ARB_shader_image_load_store support from OpenGL 4.

But before those still using Radeon HD 5000/6000 series GPUs with R600g, this doesn't take it to OpenGL 4.2 but only for the HD 6900 Cayman hardware is there OpenGL 4.2 compliance then reached. Other GPUs remain at OpenGL 3.3 due to not having FP64 support that is blocking the OpenGL 4.0 support from being exposed. We have seen some "soft" FP64 implementations worked on in the past, but nothing merged, with more and more open-source developers losing interest in these aging, pre-GCN GPUs.

David mentions that this shader image support is working better than the legacy fglrx driver's support. The patches for now can be found on Mesa-dev but will hopefully soon end up in Mesa 17.4-dev Git.