2017 starts with good news for Intel Haswell users: it has been a long time coming, but we have finally landed GL_ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 for this platform. Thanks to Matt Turner for reviewing the huge patch series!
Maybe you are not particularly excited about GL_ARB_gpu_shader_fp64, but that does not mean this is not an exciting milestone for you if you have a Haswell GPU (or even IvyBridge, read below): this extension was the last piece missing to finally bring Haswell to expose OpenGL 4.0!
If you want to give it a try but you don’t want to build the driver from the latest Mesa sources, don’t worry: the feature freeze for the Mesa 13.1 release is planned to happen in just a few days and the current plan is to have the release in early February, so if things go according to plan you won’t have to wait too long for an official release.
But that is not all, now that we have landed Fp64 we can also send for review the implementation of GL_ARB_vertex_attrib_64bit. This could be a very exciting milestone, since I believe this is the only thing missing for Haswell to have all the extensions required for OpenGL 4.5!
You might be wondering about IvyBridge too, and 2017 also starts with good news for IvyBridge users. Landing Fp64 for Haswell allowed us to send for review the IvyBridge patches we had queued up for GL_ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 which will bring IvyBridge up to OpenGL 4.0. But again, that is not all, once we land Fp64 we should also be able to send the patches for GL_vertex_attrib_64bit and get IvyBridge up to OpenGL 4.2, so look forward to this in the near future!
We have been working hard on Fp64 and Va64 during a good part of 2016, first for Broadwell and later platforms and later for Haswell and IvyBridge; it has been a lot of work so it is exciting to see all this getting to the last stages and on its way to the hands of the final users.
All this has only been possible thanks to Intel’s sponsoring and the great support and insight that our friends there have provided throughout the development and review processes, so big thanks to all of them and also to the team at Igalia that has been involved in the development with me.