Mesa News Archives

Well known open-source AMD OpenGL driver developer Marek Olšák has enabled more Linux games to run with Mesa's GLTHREAD functionality enabled for helping with the performance.

While many of you are users of Mesa Git for experiencing the bleeding-edge graphics drivers especially if you are a gamer wanting peak performance, for those on the Mesa stable series the Mesa 20.0.3 update has now shipped.

Back in December was a developer discussion over dropping or forking non-Gallium3D drivers. Since then the Intel "Iris" Gallium3D driver has successfully become the default OpenGL driver for Broadwell/Gen8 and newer while the non-Gallium3D drivers continue to just face bit rot. The discussion over dropping/forking non-Gallium3D Mesa drivers has been reignited.

In hopefully meaning less regressions moving forward for DXVK with the latest open-source Vulkan drivers, the Mesa continuous integration (CI) infrastructure saw support added for playing DirectX (DXGI) traces with DXVK/Wine.

Well known open-source AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver developer Marek Olšák has been focusing recently on improvements to glthread for OpenGL threading that is generally able to offer better performance.

This should come as little surprise to regular Phoronix readers and those that follow the Mesa release cadence, but Mesa 20.1 as the next quarterly feature release now has a release calendar putting its debut towards the end of May.

For the past year Mesa has offered a "soft" implementation of FP64 capabilities for GPUs lacking FP64 hardware capabilities in order to support ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 as required by OpenGL 4.0. Optimizations were merged today to significantly enhance the "soft FP64" capabilities of Mesa.

Mesa 20.0.2 is out this evening as the latest stable bug-fix update for the Mesa Q1'2020 driver series.

The Turnip Mesa Vulkan driver for Qualcomm Adreno graphics processors can now handle transform feedback.

Prolific ACO shader compiler back-end developer Timur Kristóf has managed to land his latest improvements in Mesa 20.1-devel for this alternative to the AMDGPU LLVM back-end supported so far by the RADV Vulkan driver.

Mesa 19.3.5 was released today for ending out the Mesa 19.3 series as the Q4'2019 OpenGL/Vulkan driver release stream.

Mesa's OpenGL threading "glthread" support has been around for a while but come Mesa 20.1 next quarter will be further improvements to this performance feature.

Following the release of Mesa 20.0 in mid-February, the first point release to this quarter's Mesa 3D feature series is now available.

The Panfrost open-source, reverse-engineered Arm Mali Gallium3D driver is seeing work on a new driver-specific IR and compiler back-end.

The LLVMpipe CPU-based software rasterizer OpenGL driver within Mesa's Gallium3D now has working tessellation shader support (ARB_tessellation_shader) and can even run Unigine Heaven demo properly, just don't expect good performance.

Mesa's Panfrost Gallium3D driver for providing open-source support for Arm Mali Midgard and Bifrost GPUs now has experimental OpenGL ES 3.0 support.

To date the Mesa "RADV" Radeon Vulkan driver hasn't supported AMD's GPUOpen Radeon GPU Profiler but that is changing.

New to Mesa 20.1-devel is a new option for the Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver to enable zeroing out video memory allocations.

Mesa 20.0 is now released as the first quarter 2020 update to the Mesa 3D open-source graphics driver stack.

It's been a while since last having any news to report on Mesa's Lima Gallium3D driver for old Mali 400/450 series hardware, but an important optimization was merged today.

New stable and development releases of Mesa3D are available for providing the latest open-source Linux graphics driver experience for OpenGL and Vulkan.

While many in the Linux community still cringe when hearing Imagination Tech's PowerVR given the troubling state of their graphics drivers over the years, in 2020 it looks like they are pursuing a new open-source graphics driver project.

While the open-source Intel "ANV" and Radeon "RADV" Vulkan drivers get talked about a lot, one of the lesser known Vulkan drivers within Mesa is Turnip but it's been gaining steam recently.

Making use of Link-Time Optimizations (LTO) and Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) is currently being talked about by Mesa developers for their release builds in potentially squeezing out better performance.

While not yet suitable for gamers or serious end usage, the Radeon "R600" Gallium3D driver that supports the Radeon HD 2000 through HD 6000 (pre-GCN) graphics cards now has an experimental NIR back-end.

Red Hat's Karol Herbst who has spent years now working on Nouveau SPIR-V support and other GPU open-source compute efforts around Mesa has provided a trivial implementation of clCreateCommandQueueWithProperties() that is now enough to begin running the OpenCL 2.0 conformance test suite on the Gallium3D "Clover" state tracker.

Zink, the project going on for almost two years for implementing OpenGL over Vulkan, might soon be exposing OpenGL 3.0 and OpenGL ES 2.0 within mainline Mesa.

Following last week's Mesa 20.0 feature freeze and code branching with the first release candidate, the second release candidate is out today for this quarterly Mesa3D update.

Mesa 20.0 feature development is over with the code now being branched from Git master and the first of several release candidates issued.

On top of the last minute Radeon Vulkan "RADV" improvements landing on Wednesday for Mesa 20.0, another big ticket item landed... Well, re-enabled.

With Mesa 20.0 scheduled for branching today (though that could be delayed a few days potentially depending upon last minute requests), there's been a flurry of Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver activity to squeeze into this first Mesa release series of 2020.

While Mesa 20.0 will be entering its feature freeze this week and branching ahead of the stable release expected in about one month, for now the Mesa 19.3 series is the newest available for stable users.

In addition to the AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D driver's on-disk shader cache and in-memory shader cache there is now a "live shader cache" to help with deduplication of compiled shader objects.

Mesa developers are planning to end feature work on Mesa 20.0 next week as this first quarter update to the Mesa 3D graphics stack.

The V3D Gallium3D driver that most notably offers the open-source graphics support for the Raspberry Pi 4 is now an official OpenGL ES 3.1 implementation.

The Valve-backed ACO compiler back-end that is optionally used by the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver has continued growing in popularity with Linux gamers and also has continued maturing a lot for Mesa 20.0 that is due out later this quarter.

There hasn't been a new Mesa stable release in a number of weeks due to the Christmas and New Year's holidays but that changed today with Mesa 19.3.2 as the first significant point release of Mesa 19.3.

The NIR intermediate representation is already faster than GLSL IR and TGSI but could be seeing even quicker linking speeds moving forward.

Zink was one of the Mesa/Gallium3D innovations that saw mainline status in 2019 for offering OpenGL support atop Vulkan hardware drivers. While an interesting approach, so far only the dated OpenGL 2.1 support has been exposed but the Collabora-led effort is closing in on OpenGL 3.0 capabilities.

Mesa3D as principally the collection of Linux OpenGL/Vulkan drivers is up to 2,996,270 lines of code (and documentation / associated scripts) within its Git tree! That should put it over the three million mark very soon while the Git activity was up by about 20% in 2019.

Similar to the trend with other Mesa drivers, the Radeon R600g driver for supporting Radeon HD 2000 through Radeon HD 6000 series graphics cards has been seeing experimental work to introduce a NIR back-end for this modern intermediate representation. That R600 NIR support now has a merge request open meaning it could possibly land still for Mesa 20.0.

Mesa 20.0 continues getting more interesting with the infrastructure around the Gallium3D LLVM "Gallivm" and TGSI IR now supporting tessellation.

Mesa's LLVMpipe Gallium3D driver has long been about running OpenGL on GPUs as a software fallback / debug path but as of this morning in Mesa 20.0-devel there is now the experimental ability of having OpenCL support making use of OpenCL "Clover" with NIR for CPU-based execution.

Joining the NIR driver bandwagon recently was LLVMpipe adding support for this new intermediate representation. Now with that support having matured, Mesa 20.0-devel's LLVMpipe software OpenGL driver is switching to NIR by default in place of TGSI.

While Mesa 19.3 was just released last week, Mesa 19.3.1 is now available rather than on its bi-weekly release cadence in order to avoid the Christmas and New Year's holidays.

The Broadcom V3D Gallium3D driver within Mesa 20.0 now has initial support for geometry shaders as needed by OpenGL ES 3.2.

After a few weeks worth of delays due to blocker bugs the release of Mesa 19.3 is out today as a big end-of-year upgrade to the open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers for Linux systems. Intel and AMD Radeon driver changes largely dominate the work as always but there is a growing number of embedded driver changes and other enhancements for this crucial piece to the open-source 3D ecosystem.

Mesa 20.0 due out in Q1'2020 is now the magical release that is set to switch on RadeonSI NIR usage by default in place of the TGSI intermediate representation. What makes this IR switch-over prominent is that OpenGL 4.6 is then enabled by default on this open-source Gallium3D driver supporting Radeon HD 7000 series GPUs and newer.

The TURNIP Mesa Vulkan driver providing support for recent Qualcomm Adreno graphics processors and akin to the Freedreno Gallium3D driver has added an important performance-boosting feature.

One of the most frequent complaints we hear from Linux gamers running open-source GPU drivers is over the lack of the hardware vendors supporting any feature-rich control panels like they do on Windows. There are many Linux driver tunables exposed by these open-source graphics drivers, but often they can only be manipulated via command-line options, environment variables, boot parameters, and other less than straight-forward means especially for recent converts from Windows and other novice Linux users. ADriConf has been doing a fairly decent job as a third-party means of helping to improve the situation and now there is talk of it supporting Vulkan driver settings.