Features To Find Right Now In Mesa 10.2-devel

Written by Michael Larabel in Mesa on 20 March 2014 at 12:30 PM EDT. 4 Comments
MESA
With the exciting news that Mesa 10.2-devel is landing in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS for providing the best possible open-source 3D driver experience, here's a round-up of the most interesting features that have been merged so far into this next Mesa release.

Given the recent three-month release cycles of Mesa, the Mesa 10.2 release will likely happen around May given the late February release of Mesa 10.1. This release could also be known as Mesa 11.0 if OpenGL 4.0 compliance was found within core Mesa. The Ubuntu 14.04 Long Term Support release is shipping in April so for now they are just shipping Git snapshots of Mesa 10.2.

Among the features that have caught our attention of Mesa 10.2 thus far in its development cycle includes:

- Official Intel Broadwell support. This baked hardware enablement for the graphics core on Intel's next-generation CPUs is likely one of the reasons Canonical decided for going with Mesa 10.2 in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

- The OpenMAX Gallium3D state tracker. AMD has been working on this OpenMAX support with a notable user of the API being GStreamer. OpenMAX is how AMD's exposing their newly-open-sourced VCE video encode support.

- Nouveau has new GL extension support, among other improvements to the NV50 and NVC0 Gallium3D drivers, including moving closer on GL4 support.

- Other new GL4 extension support.

- ARB texture gather support for Gallium3D.

- Fast color clears for RadeonSI.

- Intel compute shader support.

- Fixed-up Intel Anisotropic Filtering support with the EWA approximation algorithm.

There's also been other random OpenGL extensions added to the different Mesa/Gallium3D drivers and numerous bug-fixes, but the big work comes down to merging the OpenMAX state tracker, a few performance optimizations, and hugely important is that the Intel Broadwell support is in shape for its highly anticipated launch later in 2014.

We have already delivered some Mesa 10.2 Git benchmarks, including just this morning with Intel, Radeon, and Nouveau OpenGL tests while more Linux gaming benchmarks are forthcoming exclusively on Phoronix.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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