Mesa 18.2 Released With Vega 20 Support, OpenGL 4.4 Compat Profile & A Lot More

Following a few delays that pushed back its release date from August to ultimately today, Mesa 18.2 is out as this third-quarter 2018 update to the Mesa3D graphics driver stack most commonly associated with the Linux desktop's open-source Vulkan/OpenGL drivers for Intel, Radeon, and Nouveau (as well as many smaller drivers).

Mesa 18.2 brings a ton of new features with some of the most notable ones improving the RadeonSI OpenGL and RADV Vulkan driver support. On the Radeon front is support for the yet-to-be-released Vega 20 GPU, ASTC texture compression support for RadeonSI, various new RADV Vulkan driver extensions, OpenGL 4.4 compatibility profile support for RadeonSI that notably helps out many Wine/SteamPlay titles, OpenGL ES 3.2 support for RadeonSI too, faster LLVM shader compilation in RADV, Radeon EQAA anti-aliasing, and minor performance improvements.

Outside of the Radeon scope, this quarterly Mesa release brings OpenGL 4.3 support to the VirGL driver for OpenGL acceleration in VirtIO-enabled KVM guests, Vulkan display extensions for improving the SteamVR Linux support, the Broadcom V3D driver is now enabled by default, the Mesa shader cache supports caching RadeonSI compute shaders, various NIR optimizations, some OpenGL extension additions for Nouveau NVC0, and various other work.

On the Intel driver front are more NIR optimizations, the march is still on towards OpenGL 4.6 support with SPIR-V ingestion, various new Vulkan driver extensions for ANV, and other optimizations as well as new hardware support.

See my Mesa 18.2 feature overview to learn even more about the many changes found in this update thanks to Intel, AMD, Valve, Broadcom, Red Hat, and many other contributors -- including plenty of independent contributors.

Mesa 18.2.0 is available for download from Mesa3D.org. To round out a busy year for Mesa, the 18.3 release will likely come around the end of November or early December. Mesa 18.3 development remains in full swing with a lot of interesting work already on the master branch.