Companies developing software for mobile, embedded or desktop environments often find the graphics and rendering software stack to be one of their greatest challenges. The most successful devices and software platforms have optimized graphics stacks to provide the best user experiences.

Hardware accelerated 3D APIs

Igalia has a long history of using 3D APIs to provide accelerated graphics solutions for our customers. Our engineers have a strong background in OpenGL (ES) and Vulkan, both as API users and also as implementors. Igalia is also a member of Khronos, the group driving the specifications for OpenGL (ES), Vulkan, and more. As a member, we participate in reviewing, developing and bugfixing tests in the Khronos Conformance Test Suite used to certify OpenGL (ES) and Vulkan drivers.

OpenGL (ES) and Vulkan drivers

We have been contributing for years to the development of open source user-space OpenGL (ES) and Vulkan drivers for desktop and mobile GPUs.

Igalia has collaborated with GPU vendors, like Intel or Broadcom, playing an important role in acquiring hardware conformance certification for the latest versions of the OpenGL (ES) and Vulkan APIs.

We have experience in developing Vulkan and OpenGL ES open source drivers for mobile and embedded platforms. We do feature development for drivers supporting GPUs such as Qualcomm’s Adreno, but also create new ones like a new Vulkan driver for Broadcom’s VideoCore GPUs. This work is used in a variety of hardware, like the popular boards designed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

At Igalia we help raise the overall quality of graphics drivers through our work on the shared driver infrastructure in Mesa. The goal is to provide the best possible end-user experience to both individual Mesa driver users and platform owners for whom delivering a good graphics driver experience is fundamental for their success, such as Valve’s Steam.

Our work in the driver stack goes from the creation of new OpenGL (ES) and Vulkan drivers on Mesa, to feature development, shader compiler front-end and back-end optimization, general bugfixing, and management of the whole Release Cycle, including setting and tuning of Continuous Integration practices.

All this experience in 3D APIs, and internals of the GPU hardware, plus the insights obtained through our Khronos membership, allows Igalia to offer highly specialized consulting services that help our customers optimize the usage of these technologies in their software solutions.

Linux graphics pipelines

Igalia is highly experienced with the different open source graphics pipelines on Linux. Along the way, we’ve built accelerated compositors, integrated display servers (Wayland/Weston), eliminated hardware bottlenecks, optimized rendering of web browsers, and perfected font display.

Web browser engines are very complex stacks of technologies, and yet Igalia has contributed to most of the graphics pipelines of all of the main open source web browsers. Our stand out achievements include leading the development of the graphic stack for Linux ports of WebKit browser engine (like WebKitGTK and WPE) and actively contributing to Gecko and Servo rendering engines through our work in WebRender.

We have maintained gstreamer-vaapi GStreamer plugins to provide hardware-accelerated encoding/decoding support for most Intel-based platforms and some AMD-based GPUs as well, and we have also worked on Vulkan Video support for GStreamer.