David Airlie Is Bringing OpenGL 4.2 To More R600 Gallium3D Hardware

David Airlie is breathing some new open-source life into older Radeon GPUs with his "R600g-Rats" branch where he's bringing OpenGL 4.2 and other features to this older driver.

A Phoronix reader pointed out the r600-rats Git branch that Airlie has been working on in recent days. This is a big step forward as currently R600g in Mesa Git for pre-GCN AMD GPUs has just OpenGL 4.1 for HD 5800/6900 series hardware while bound to OpenGL 3.3 for other hardware due to lacking native FP64 support.

In r600-rats there are "hacks" to enable OpenGL 4.2 for R600g-enabled hardware not having hardware FP64 support. As part of getting to this threshold he's done work-in-progress functionality on atomics, compute shaders, SSBO, and various other features added over the past week.

We'll see what comes of this "r600-rats" branch and the WIP/HACKS code will get cleaned up and eventually merged into Mesa Git for improving the Radeon HD 6000 series and older hardware on this open-source OpenGL driver stack.