Mesa News Archives

Jon Turney has landed his big "Windows-DRI" patch-set in Mesa for improving the support when running GLX applications under under Cygwin. The patches provide direct-to-native-OpenGL for GLX clients running on Cygwin.

Emil Velikov announced the "emergency release" this morning of Mesa 12.0.3 as the latest stable installment for the Mesa 12.0 series.

Those making use of the VC4 Gallium3D driver for open-source Raspberry Pi OpenGL support will want to pull down the latest Mesa Git code if you are interested in double-digit performance improvements for at least some OpenGL workloads.

There has already been more improvements hitting Mesa Git this week.

With many Linux gamers having looked forward to the Linux release of Rocket League, I tested out the Linux port of the game when using Mesa RadeonSI Gallium3D as well as the AMDGPU-PRO blob.

Veteran Mesa developer Ilia Mirkin has been working on finishing up the core plumbing for OpenGL ES 3.2 / Android Extension Pack support for the Mesa drivers.

A fix landed in Mesa Git today that should address various performance issues people have been seeing in different rare setups. The fix mostly seems to be for Radeon/Intel users seeing low performance recently with glxgears but also appears to help those affected by the much talked about R9 290 regression.

The long-awaited Mesa point release update to Mesa 12 is now available with a variety of fixes for these open-source graphics drivers.

Following the AMDGPU SI / GCN 1.0 support hitting Mesa, the libdrm changes for AMD Southern Islands support has also landed.

Aside from the major Mesa 12.0 release, this month has been relatively quiet for Mesa stable point releases, which traditionally have come around every two weeks. It looks like that will be back on track shortly.

With the work on the Intel Vulkan driver, OpenGL 4.x being close to finished off for the main graphics drivers, and AMD doubling down work on performance optimizations, there is already more code changes in Mesa Git this year than all of 2015.

Gallium3D's VA-API state tracker has already supported H.265/HEVC video decoding as well as the support being in Gallium3D VDPAU too with it being supported by Radeon's open-source UVD code. Rounding out the API video-accelerated decode coverage of H.265 is now OpenMAX support.

The RadeonSI Gallium3D driver continues stepping ever so closely to OpenGL 4.4 and 4.5 compliance.

After already making a ton of improvements to the RadeonSI Gallium3D stack this month, Marek Olšák is looking to end the month on a high note with yet more fixes to the open-source AMD driver.

As a quick follow-up to OpenGL ES 3.1 coming for Intel Haswell graphics, those patches have now landed in Mesa Git.

It's off to a good Friday so far in Mesa Git for open-source Radeon users.

For those running Intel Haswell processors, hope is not lost in seeing new versions of OpenGL extensions with the Intel Mesa driver. New patches will bring Haswell up to OpenGL ES 3.1.

Broadcom's Eric Anholt has written another weekly blog post covering improvements he made over the past week to the VC4 open-source graphics driver that's known as being the driver for Raspberry Pi devices.

Marek Olšák has managed to secure another performance win with his continued efforts to improve the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver performance.

Earlier this week the deferred flushes change landed in Radeon Gallium3D code for reportedly offering 23%+ performance improvements in BioShock Infinite as one example. I've tested out BioShock Infinite and other changes to confirm the performance differences.

One of the latest initiatives worked on by Eric Anholt at Broadcom for the VC4 Gallium3D driver -- the open-source driver used most famously by the Raspberry Pi hardware -- is lower memory use.

AMD developer Marek Olšák continues leading their recent charge on looking to boost the performance potential out of Mesa / Gallium3D.

AMD's RadeonSI Gallium3D driver could soon be down to just two GL extensions left before seeing OpenGL 4.4 compliance.

Marek Olšák at AMD continues optimizing the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for offering much better Linux gaming performance when using this open-source AMD graphics driver code. The latest are double-digit gains for at least the BioShock Infinite game.

Red Hat developer Rob Clark, the founder of the Freedreno driver for open-source reverse-engineered Qualcomm Adreno support, has made some significant performance optimizations to this Gallium3D driver.

Consulting firm Igalia who was contracted by Intel to help work on their open-source Mesa driver has written a blog post about some of the progress they've made the past year.

The latest work landing in Mesa Git has been for H.264 VA-API video encoding.

Marek Olšák of AMD has been working on some Gallium3D optimizations for boosting the performance of the popular BioShock Infinite game on Linux.

Thanks to work by AMD developers, there is support for accelerated H.264 video encoding with the VA-API implementation in Gallium3D.

For quite a while now Intel and Collabora developers have been working on an on-disk shader cache similar to what's offered by the NVIDIA proprietary driver for allowing GLSL shaders to be compiled and then cached on-disk, making it quicker to load the shaders in the future. It's looking like the Intel shader cache implementation may soon be ready for Git.

Just a few hours ago I was writing about NVIDIA making public the GP100 "Pascal" GPU firmware binaries needed for as a requirement for bringing up GeForce GTX 1000 series hardware acceleration on the open-source driver stack. Now the initial support has landed in Nouveau's NVC0 Gallium3D driver within Mesa for allowing 3D support.

Being half-way through the year now and also given the recent Mesa 12.0 release I decided to run some Git statistics on Mesa to see how this year is panning out for its development.

Timothy Arceri sent out the latest version of his Intel Mesa patches for the ARB_enhanced_layouts OpenGL extension. These patches finish up this last GL extension that's needed by this open-source Intel Linux driver before it can claim OpenGL 4.4 and then 4.5 compliance.

While we're already one week into July, Mesa 12.0 has been quietly riding well past its June release schedule.

Earlier this week there were some last minute AMDGPU DRM kernel patches submitted that were needed for AMD's imminent Radeon RX 480 "Polaris" launch while today some last minute Mesa patches have materialized.

Emil Velikov announced the release this morning of the fourth and final planned release candidate for Mesa 12.0.

Timothy Arceri of Collabora has prepped the latest version of his massive patch-set for providing an on-disk shader cache for Mesa, albeit focused for now on the Intel DRI driver.

The newest OpenGL extension now supported by Mesa is GL_EXT_window_rectangles.

Both the Intel i965 and AMD RadeonSI drivers within Mesa have seen separate work done over the past day for boosting the performance of compute shaders with these open-source OpenGL drivers.

Ahead of the official Mesa 12.0 debut later this month, Mesa release manager Emil Velikov of Collabora has announced 12.0 Release Candidate 2.

Marek Olšák posted a patch today to significantly boost the performance for games using multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) on both the R600g and RadeonSI Gallium3D drivers.

If you've read Phoronix for any real length of time you've likely come across articles talking about Intel's Mesa driver and various work on the intermediate representations (IRs) of the driver. If you still are wondering about the Mesa driver's IR, here's a introductory blog post done by our friends at Igalia.

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.

With the branching this week for the huge Mesa 12.0 milestone, here are some fresh Mesa 11.2 stable vs. Mesa Git benchmarks I ran today/yesterday with several graphics cards on Ubuntu 16.04 with the Padoka PPA for the updated Mesa Git stack plus also pulling down the Linux 4.6.0 stable release.

Enabling compiler Link-Time Optimizations (LTO) by default for Mesa in non-debug builds is being discussed in the name of performance and binary size.

With Mesa 12 now having been branched with plans to release next month, the code is under a feature freeze as developers turn to fixing bugs ahead of this stable release. With no more major features planned, here's an overview of the new features for Mesa 12.0.

Mesa release manager Emil Velikov has announced the first release candidate of Mesa 12.0, formerly known as Mesa 11.3.

With the main Mesa drivers (Intel, RadeonSI, NVC0) jumping ahead to OpenGL 4.3 and mostly done with OpenGL 4.4/4.5, plus Intel adding their Vulkan driver, and many other improvements over the past three months, the next stable release of Mesa is going to be massive.

Intel's Mesa Linux graphics driver is now officially at OpenGL 4.3 compliance.

Francisco Jerez of Intel was pushing his SIMD32 changes into Mesa Git over night and benefits the driver's ARB_compute_shader support.