OpenGL doesn’t receive nearly as much love these days as the Vulkan API, but over the past several months there’s been at least one notable new extension in the works: cross-vendor mesh shader support with the pending GL_EXT_mesh_shader extension. Beginning today the AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D upstreaming process has begun for introducing mesh shader support for this Radeon OpenGL driver.
Going back to last year has been this OpenGL pull request for adding GL_EXT_mesh_shader as an OpenGL extension fork of Vulkan’s VK_EXT_mesh_shader. Developers at least from the Nvidium project as a rendering engine for Sodium with Minecraft Java Edition have been interested in seeing OpenGL mesh shader support work outside the confines of NVIDIA’s vendor extension for it (GL_NV_mesh_shader).
AMD engineer Qiang Yu has been leading the GL_EXT_mesh_shader effort as well as working on the RadeonSI driver implementation. Today he landed radeonsi: prepare changes for mesh shader support
. He explained he’s begun upstreaming the RadeonSI mesh shader support piece by piece:
“I’m going to upstream mesh shader changes part by part. This part contains preparation code.”
But for those interested in testing the complete work, this patch series is where all the mesh shader code is being staged for RadeonSI.
Though with the Mesa 25.2 feature freeze / code branching expected next week it remains to be seen if all of this RadeonSI mesh shader work will manage to be upstreamed in time for this next quarterly feature release. The GL_EXT_mesh_shader extension doc also has yet to be merged into the upstream OpenGL registry. In any case it looks like this OpenGL mesh shader support is still set to land in 2025.
