Mesa 12.1-dev Is Off To The Races

While Mesa 12.0 was just branched days ago and is going to be an extraordinary release, new work is already building up for Mesa 12.1-dev that will be released around September.

Landing today in Git were a heck of a lot of changes primarily on the RadeonSI side. This included more PBO work by Nicolai Hähnle on the Mesa state tracker, various RadeonSI tweaks, several AMDGPU winsys changes, and more.

Just the flurry of 50+ commits in the past 24 hours to Mesa Git (or 100+ in the past two days) isn't the reason for the message, but to also get excited those riding Mesa Git with AMD GCN hardware that more optimizations are on the way for RadeonSI / R600.

AMD's Marek Olšák sent out ten patches to the mailing list today primarily for cache flush fixes and clean-ups for the old R600g driver, but at least one of the patches does touch some common code. According to one tester, the patch today on a Radeon 380X (RadeonSI + AMDGPU) setup, The Talos Principle performance is improved from 8.3 FPS to 28.3 FPS while maintaining the same settings. If that's all correct , wow! (The first result does seem rather low, particularly compared to some of my older Talos Principle benchmarks on RadeonSI.)

For being less than a week into the Mesa 12.1-dev cycle, there's already a lot starting to build up and additional work that's been floating on the Mesa-dev mailing list that's yet to be merged. Let's just hope Mesa 12.0 doesn't look too stale by the time it's officially released later this month!

What are you hoping to see from Mesa 12.1? How far do you think the drivers will get with OGL4: OpenGL 4.4 or 4.5 for all the major drivers? Share your hopes and predictions about Mesa 12.1 by commenting on this article in our forums.