Open-Source Intel Mesa Driver Now Supports OpenGL 3.2

An anonymous reader writes "Mesa and its open-source Intel graphics driver now are in compliance with the OpenGL 3.2 specification (PDF). It took four years for Mesa to get up to GL 3.2 / GLSL 1.50 compliance, and support for the other Mesa drivers isn't too far behind, but they're still years behind in supporting OpenGL 4. Supporting a major new OpenGL API has resulted in Mesa 10.0 being called the next release. It has many other features, like performance improvements and new Gallium3D features. OpenGL 3.3 support might also be completed prior to the Mesa 10.0 release in November."

Re:

[Rockoon]

...any game with a low quality graphics setting at a low resolution

You would be quite shocked

[tuppe666]

...any game with a low quality graphics setting at a low resolution

I have the sameish processor and its surprisingly nippy. I just ploughed through the half life/2 series running at 1080P its getting on a little, but still looks very nice.

I have been thinking of treating myself to an AMD card...because of the lesser of two evils Nvidia being a little too full of shit for my liking, when Intel can throw 30 programmers behind their open source graphics on Linux, but steam seems to have given Nvidia their blessing...but right now I don't have to rush that choice. I have on-b

Re:

[r1348]

Well, actually Valve will release SteamBoxes with AMD cards too: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTQ4Mjc [phoronix.com]
Just the first batch of prototypes focuses on Nvidia.

Re: You would be quite shocked

[Sigg3.net]

If you can live with a binary blob, nVidia is great. The company still supports chips that aren't on sale any longer.

But I'd prefer an open source driver with 3D support.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

The change is only for Ivy Bridge and Haswell.

Re:

[FreonTrip]

It probably won't hurt across-the-board performance, so even titles you've played 'til now may benefit. Give the new Amnesia a try - if my Macbook Air's Intel HD 5000 can push it along at 1440x900, you may have luck at 720p on the HD 3000.

Re:

[timeOday]

Maybe... in benchmarks the Intel HD 5000 is *much* faster than the 4000, let alone 3000. Then again the Air has a very low-wattage chip so maybe you lose some back to older HD 3000 desktop processors?

Re:

[FreonTrip]

Late in getting back to this, but yes: the HD 5000's definitely hobbled a bit by the 15W TDP restriction of the i5-4250U. Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs probably wouldn't be sexy on the HD 3000, but should be manageable at low to medium quality settings and conservative resolutions.

Truly a great day

[Chemisor]

This is truly a great day for Linux gaming.

Re:

[cheesybagel]

IMO they need to unify the Linux graphics subsystem with the Android graphics subsystem. Then you will have much easier to port games not to mention more advanced functionality. Games don't need OpenGL. OpenGL ES is fine. This might be a problem for the Linux workstation market though.

Re:

[FreonTrip]

OpenGL 4.1 already has full API compatibility with OpenGL ES 2.0. Let's not go throwing out decades of hard work for a little bit of convenience with regard to video games, especially when hardware going forward will all be capable of transparently handling the API you wanna switch to. As for throwing out X11 and tossing in the Android graphics stack for everybody, that's madness for a thousand reasons.

Market Share

[tuppe666]

Intel Market Share is 60%; Nvidia/AMD about 20% even Steam place Intel share at 15%(and Growing); Nvidia with 50%, AMD with 30%.

Cool, but why?

[sl4shd0rk]

Isn't Mesa software rendering? I've never found it to be anything but abysmal performance. Why does anyone use it?

Re:

[paskie]

Nope. Mesa is a generic OpenGL API implementation that can use multiple backends - either software rendering or Gallium / DRI.

Re:

[adolf]

Wait. Mesa stopped supporting GLIDE?

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Mesa is the graphics API implementation that can used for both software and hardware-accelerated rendering.

Re:Cool, but why?

[timeOday]

I had thought the same, but from the first 3 sentences of "Mesa Introduction" on their homepage, mesa3d.org:

Mesa is an open-source implementation of the OpenGL specification - a system for rendering interactive 3D graphics.

A variety of device drivers allows Mesa to be used in many different environments ranging from software emulation to complete hardware acceleration for modern GPUs.

Mesa ties into several other open-source projects: the Direct Rendering Infrastructure and X.org to provide OpenGL support to users of X on Linux, FreeBSD and other operating systems.

and later on the page...

Mesa is the OpenGL implementation for several types of hardware made by Intel, AMD and NVIDIA, plus the VMware virtual GPU. There's also several software-based renderers

Re:

[Kjella]

Isn't Mesa software rendering? I've never found it to be anything but abysmal performance. Why does anyone use it?

Mesa is many things, among them a huge graphics library to support the OpenGL API, a reference software rendering driver and a bunch of hardware accelerated drivers. The only reason to use the software rendering is to test accelerated drivers or because you don't have a choice and in the past you didn't really have a lot of choice. Today AMD and Intel has official open drivers, for nVidia there's the community built Nouveau that all have good hardware acceleration support, so it's pretty hard to find a grap

Re:

[Gavagai80]

Today AMD and Intel has official open drivers, for nVidia there's the community built Nouveau

What open drivers does AMD have? I'd love to get one for my AMD but as far as I've seen the only open options are pathetically inferior to the closed AMD drivers.

Re:

[Xtifr]

There was reportedly a huge jump in performance [phoronix.com] with the 3.5 kernel series (as high as 38% in at least one case), and a lot more work was done with 3.6 through 3.10.

Re:

[haruchai]

Thanks for that - I wasn't aware ATI gaming support had improved that much under Linux. An article posted today promises still more improvements in various games under the soon-to-be-released 3.12

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=amd_linux312_preview&num=1 [phoronix.com]

Re:Cool, but why?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a pretty complicated setup for the uninitiated, but the basics are this:

Mesa was originally just a reference software implementation of OpenGL. People started making graphics drivers that started accelerating parts of the graphics rendering code. These drivers grew quite large and are considered "classic drivers". They are mostly just big monolithic blobs that accelerate whatever they please. The intel driver is one of the only classic drivers remaining.

People wanted something a bit more flexible and easier to extend, so gallium3d was devised. Shaders are compiled into an intermediate language called TGSI, and then passed to the gallium3d drivers to be converted into command streams/assembly that will run on the video card. This system is a bit like a generic interface to the card's capabilities, and can in theory be run independently of OpenGL. Nouveau and radeon both use gallium3d drivers instead of the classic driver model.

All of the modern 3d accelerated drivers also make use of the DRI interface, which is an interface to the linux drivers that allows them to pass draw commands directly to the kernel's drm driver. There are also state trackers, which help generate TGSI for the gallium drivers. These exist for things like dri, gles, opencl, vdpau and help make sharing functionality between the various gallium3d drivers easier.

There are probably a few things wrong in here so don't take it as scripture, but it should give the overall picture of how things work. If anyone notices anything wrong please point it out.