OpenGL Mesh Shader Extension Merged

Proposed last year was GL_EXT_mesh_shader as a cross-vendor mesh shading extension. That OpenGL mesh shader work led by an AMD engineer was merged today into the OpenGL Registry.

That GL_EXT_mesh_shader support was worked on the past year in tandem with mesh shader support for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver and landing the necessary prerequisites upstream in Mesa. There's also been Zink driver work on OpenGL mesh shader support too.

This OpenGL mesh shader support was motivated in part by the Nvidium project as a rendering engine for Sodium with Minecraft Java Edition have been interested in seeing OpenGL mesh shader support work outside the confines of NVIDIA's vendor extension for it (GL_NV_mesh_shader).

As of a short time ago, the GL_EXT_mesh_shader support was merged to the OpenGL Registry. Now that it's official, hopefully the remaining bits of the Mesa driver support will be merged soon.

Valve open-source graphics Mesa developer Mike Blumenkrantz has also blogged with some additional commentary on this exciting milestone for OpenGL in 2025.