The Open Source AMD R600 Driver Supports OpenGL 3.0

In a follow up to my previous post that Mesa3D (the open-source implementation of the OpenGL API) will begin supporting OpenGL 3.0 and GLSL 1.30 from the next release; Phoronix is reporting that the open source AMD driver for the R600 series of chipsets can now leverage the new OpenGL 3.0 support in Mesa.

The open-source AMD drivers are remarkably stable, although slower than AMD's official "fglrx" driver. The new OpenGL 3.0 support is an amazing step forward for the open-source driver stack.

This means that anyone with an R600 based card (which includes me!) will get full OpenGL 3.0 hardware acceleration out of the box on Linux after the next round of distro releases.

If anyone is curious to see the source code of the commit that introduces this support, take a look here.