Asahi Linux achieves OpenGL 4.6 & OpenGL ES 3.2 conformance on Apple Silicon Macs

In a significant development, the independent developer team behind the Asahi Linux project has achieved OpenGL 4.6 conformance and OpenGL ES 3.2 on Apple Silicon Macs. This marks a substantial improvement from the previous support for only OpenGL 4.1.

Apple shifted its focus to its proprietary Metal graphics API, moving away from OpenGL support after macOS Mavericks in 2013. The company has remained conformant with OpenGL 4.1, despite officially deprecating support for the standard in 2018.

In contrast, Asahi Linux has not only matched but surpassed Apple's OpenGL support. Alyssa Rosenzweig, in her announcement post, stated that “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.”

Users running the Fedora-based Asahi Linux spin on Apple M1 devices can now leverage this enhanced OpenGL / OpenGL ES support. However, the team continues its work to bring the Vulkan API support to Apple Silicon, and to get the AGX DRM kernel graphics driver upstreamed into Linux.