Apple M1 gets OpenGL 4.6 and OpenGL ES 3.2 support on Linux

Developer Alyssa Rosenzweig announced in a blog post that support for the Apple M1 has been improved, with the latest updates bringing full conformant OpenGL 4.6 on the M1. This includes OpenGL ES 3.2 support too, bumping it up from OpenGL 4.1.

Poking a bit of fun at Apple, Rosenzweig noted "Unlike the vendor’s non-conformant 4.1 drivers, our open source Linux drivers are conformant to the latest OpenGL versions, finally promising broad compatibility with modern OpenGL workloads, like Blender, Ryujinx, and Citra."

So for all of you who have a device with the M1, you should hopefully now be able to run even more games and software. OpenGL 4.6 brings with it the likes of compute shaders, SPIR-V, upgraded transform feedback and more.

More from the blog post:

While the vendor doesn’t yet support graphics standards like modern OpenGL, we do. For this Valentine’s Day, we want to profess our love for interoperable open standards. We want to free users and developers from lock-in, enabling applications to run anywhere the heart wants without special ports. For that, we need standards conformance. Six months ago, we became the first conformant driver for any standard graphics API for the M1 with the release of OpenGL ES 3.1 drivers. Today, we’ve finished OpenGL with the full 4.6… and we’re well on the road to Vulkan.

The power of Linux and open source at play here once again. The full post is worth a read if you're into learning more behind the scenes on the driver development.

You can try it out with the Fedora Asahi Remix.