For next quarter’s Mesa 26.0 release, the AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver will present OpenGL mesh shaders support. It’s been a long journey from the GL_EXT_mesh_shader extension being crafted and merged to wiring up the Mesa driver support while now it’s in place for the AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver.
AMD engineer Qiang Yu has been leading the effort on GL_EXT_mesh_shader as a cross-vendor OpenGL extension for mesh shaders compared to NVIDIA’s prior vendor-specific extension. This extension was worked on the past year with such functionality having been sought by the Nvidium project for Minecraft.
Last month the EXT_mesh_shader extension was merged into the OpenGL Registry and from there Mesa’s Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver added support and now all the necessary bits are in place for the RadeonSI driver.
This merge hitting the Git code overnight adds RadeonSI mesh shader support now working for Mesa 26.0 with AMD GFX10.3 and newer GPUs. A rare noteworthy addition to OpenGL drivers in recent years.
