More OpenGL Extensions For RadeonSI Are The Latest In A Flurry Of Interesting Activity

Written by Michael Larabel in Radeon on 9 August 2018 at 07:26 AM EDT. 13 Comments
RADEON
Marek Olšák has continued his busy work on the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver by implementing more extensions and adjusting various limits/constants to match the behavior of their proprietary driver.

In the past few days Marek has fleshed out the EQAA GL extensions, ASTC compression for Gallium drivers, and yesterday was EXT_gpu_shader4 support for vintage/legacy OpenGL 2 applications.

Today he dropped patches introducing support for some "easy OpenGL extensions." Those latest extensions for RadeonSI include AMD_gpu_shader_int64, AMD_multi_draw_indirect, AMD_query_buffer_object, AMD_texture_texture4, EXT_vertex_attrib_64bit, EXT_disjoint_timer_query, and KHR_texture_compression_astc_sliced_3d.

Coming in just before those eight patches were 14 patches to adjust limits and constants. The focus there is on having similar limits/values exposed to match the behavior of AMD's closed-source OpenGL driver.

The intentions of this work -- besides the obvious, a more complete OpenGL driver -- aren't immediately clear. But it is interesting that EXT_gpu_shader4 gets wired in a decade after being introduced and the only benefactor is legacy programs... Of which some workstation users fall into that boat. And then following EXT_gpu_shader4 are patches come for trying to match the limits of the closed-source OpenGL driver along with a slew of AMD_* OpenGL vendor extensions get implemented. Given the overall performance these days of AMDGPU+RadeonSI, the OpenGL compatibility profile context now supporting OpenGL 4, and these latest improvements, I wouldn't be surprised if AMD is positioning to be using RadeonSI in more use-cases for customers. We'll see if anything else comes up on the horizon.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week