Collabora's Mark Filion informs Softpedia about the latest progress done by past and present Collabora developers on bringing the Intel graphics driver on par with its Windows equivalent.

Timothy Arceri reports for Collabora in a recent blog post that it's a known fact that the open source Intel OpenGL video driver was always behind times, always trying to catch up to the proprietary video drivers that are available for Microsoft Windows operating systems.

That ends now, as the Collabora team, who always had lots of contributions to the Linux kernel, managed to reach a major milestone by implementing OpenGL 4.4 support to the open source Intel video driver supporting recent Intel Broadwell and Intel Skylake platforms.

"At Collabora, I recently had the opportunity to implement the ARB_enhanced_layouts extension which was last extension required to enable 4.4," says Timothy Arceri. "As described in the extensions overview this extension brings six new enhancements to the GL shader language to improve the development experience for OpenGL developers."

Shortly after the respective announcement, Collabora developer Timothy Arceri will start work and concentrate all of its efforts on upgrading the OpenGL support to version 4.5, thus making the open source Intel graphics driver the best and allowing users of GNU/Linux distributions to fully take advantage of their Intel hardware.

In the upcoming months, Collabora's kernel developers and hackers will work hard on bringing more awesome features and performance improvements to the open source Intel OpenGL video driver, such as shader cache and loop unrolling for improving the optimization passes for the GL shader language compiler. All these goodies should be available in the next major kernel release, Linux 4.8, which just received its first Release Candidate build.