14 DAY TRIAL // Ubuntu gamers relying upon their Intel Haswell graphics card series to play various games that support these GPUs will be happy to learn that the open-source Intel drivers now support OpenGL 4.2.
Until today, the Intel i965 graphics drivers offered by the well-known Padoka and Oibaf PPAs for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) and Ubuntu 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) operating systems exposed only OpenGL 4.0 for Intel Haswell GPUs, thus support for some demanding games just wasn't there.
Last week, we told you that the Mesa team decided to change the versioning scheme of the devel branch to Mesa 17.0.0 from 13.1.0, a change that, apparently, will happen at the beginning of every year, and that developer Juan A. Suarez Romero announced new patches that implement support for Intel Haswell 64-bit vertex attributes.
Since then, we've been monitoring the Padoka and Oibaf PPAs, and only today, January 14, 2017, are these patches available in both of them for the Intel i965 open-source graphics drivers, along with the latest Mesa 17.0.0-devel series, of course. Take a look at the screenshot below to see OpenGL 4.2 enabled after updating the drivers.
Here's how to update/install Padoka or Oibaf PPAs in Ubuntu
If you're an avid Ubuntu gamer using Ubuntu 16.04 LTS or Ubuntu 16.10, you need to have the Padoka or Oibaf PPAs installed for your system to sport updated and optimized open graphics drivers. Below, you'll find easy instructions on how to install these Personal Package Archives; just copy/paste the commands in the Terminal app.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:oibaf/graphics-drivers -y
sudo apt update && sudo apt dist-upgrade
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:paulo-miguel-dias/mesa -y
sudo apt update && sudo apt dist-upgrade
Our favorite is the Padoka PPA because we believe it's currently a bit more advanced than the Oibaf one, though that can change in the future. Please carefully read the description of each PPA before installing, and keep in mind that you can't have them both installed.