Merged today into Mesa 21.2-devel is OpenGL ES 3.1 support being exposed for the Panfrost Gallium3D driver that provides open-source Arm Mali graphics.
Mesa News Archives
2,391 Mesa open-source and Linux related news articles on Phoronix since 2006.
Mesa's Direct3D 12 driver maintained by Microsoft as part of their WSL and Windows OpenGL-over-D3D12 efforts has added a means of being able to select between multiple GPUs/adapters.
Mesa 21.1.2 is out today as the latest bi-weekly point release for the latest stable Mesa 3D series.
Zink as Mesa's OpenGL implementation atop Vulkan continues seeing a lot of work particularly by Mike Blumenkrantz working under contract for Valve. The latest is a major rework to Zink's shader cache implementation so it will actually work as desired and in an optimal manner.
For those that wait until the first point release of a new quarterly Mesa 3D driver stack feature release before upgrading, now is the time to move to the Mesa 21.1.1 series.
Mike Blumenkrantz working under contract for Valve on the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation continues making remarkable progress on this Mesa code.
Virglrenderer that is part of the open-source Linux effort to provide accelerated OpenGL to guest virtual machines has been enjoying some new micro-optimizations.
Turnip is the open-source Mesa Vulkan driver aligned with the Freedreno effort for Qualcomm Adreno support. Turnip has been in fairly good shape but fixes and other improvements keep flowing in as new Vulkan games/apps continue to be tested on this open-source Adreno Vulkan driver.
Mesa 21.1 is available today as the latest quarterly feature release to this collection of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers. There are many features to show with this new release and it even managed to release on-schedule.
Going on for a few years now has been some Mesa optimizations for AMD Ryzen CPUs and in particular L3 cache optimizations. There is now a fix to re-enable this support after it was mistakenly broken earlier this year.
Those moving to Mesa 21.x releases for the latest open-source GPU driver support on Linux are seemingly finding their Valve "Trust Factor" matchmaking system scores dropping for Counter-Strike: GO, leading to numerous upset Linux gamers with AMD Radeon GPUs.
Alyssa Rosenzweig has continued her work reverse engineering and understanding Apple's M1 GPU with the ultimate goal of writing open-source OpenGL and Vulkan support for the Apple M1 GPU on Linux.
While Zink implements OpenGL 4 and is running an increasing number of games with good performance, one of the simple "demos" it hasn't been able to render correctly in recent years has been glxgears. But that milestone is now crossed once again with the latest Mesa code.
Whether you are a stable Mesa user or living more on the bleeding-edge with Git or development snapshots, there are new updates out today for this collection of open-source Linux GPU drivers.
Well known open-source AMD Linux graphics driver developer Marek Olšák published an initial proposal this week as "a redesign of how Linux graphics drivers work."
Last week 4A Games released Metro Exodus for Linux and while there were a few issues at launch, at least one of them is now resolved.
Red Hat graphics driver developer David Airlie has tried running the DOOM (2016) game on the CPU-based Lavapipe Vulkan driver... It works, but isn't fast and currently requires some hacks.
Alyssa Rosenzweig, known for her work on the Panfrost open-source driver for Arm Mali graphics, has published the latest findings around the Apple M1 graphics processor. In fact, enough understanding to get a shaded, spinning cube rendering on the Apple M1 using a simple demo so far while the open-source driver support is still the goal.
Feature development for this quarter's Mesa 21.1 release is now over with it having been branched from main and the first release candidate issued.
The feature freeze and code branching for Mesa 21.1 is imminent but last minute feature work continues to pour in. Hitting Mesa Git this morning as the latest activity were some fixes and improvements in Gallium Nine for providing Direct3D 9 support atop Gallium3D drivers to Wine/Windows programs.
The "Virgl" virtual 3D GPU project for providing OpenGL (and work-in-progress VirtIO-GPU Vulkan) acceleration within guest virtual machines continues to mature for improving the open-source Linux desktop virtualization stack.
It was just a few days ago was the talking of the VirtIO-GPU Vulkan driver looking to be upstreamed into Mesa and now this Google "Venus" project has indeed landed.
This quarter's Mesa 21.1 feature release will continue to offer more improvements for Lavapipe, the CPU-based software Vulkan implementation. The latest today is Vulkan 1.1 now being advertised.
Mesa 21.0.2 is out today as the latest bi-weekly point release to the Mesa3D open-source Vulkan/OpenGL drivers.
The VirtIO-GPU Vulkan driver is looking to be upstreamed in Mesa in allowing Vulkan support for virtualized guests that in turn is handled by the host's Vulkan driver/hardware.
For those that managed to get their hands on Radeon RX 6000 series hardware and are habitual Mesa Git users, the newest Mesa 21.1-devel code for RADV has a new knob for performance testing.
Mesa 21.1 is looking to be another exciting release to be introduced later this quarter while going into feature freeze around mid-April. The latest work to land is threaded context support for Zink, which means faster performance for this OpenGL-over-Vulkan implementation.
Mesa this quarter saw the release of Mesa 21.0 with many OpenGL and Vulkan improvements, a lot of work continues building up around the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation, Lavapipe continued advancing for software-based Vulkan, Intel and AMD continued with their stellar open-source hardware support, and performance optimizations in Mesa and lower down the stack are seemingly never-ending.
Mesa developers are currently discussing the raising of the default compiler baseline for Mesa drivers moving forward, which would raise the base CPU requirements for these open-source Mesa drivers unless overriding the compiler flags. However, only the very oldest systems would be negatively impacted.
Google's open-source SwiftShader has been supporting a software-based Vulkan implementation for some time, building off its prior OpenGL / GLES and D3D9 support. While SwiftShader's Vulkan implementation has received heavy investment and attention from Google, it turns out Mesa's Lavapipe software implementation is beginning to pull ahead.
Intel's latest addition to Mesa 21.1 with their "ANV" Vulkan driver is... A null hardware layer.
Panfrost has been the Gallium3D driver providing open-source OpenGL for Arm Mali Bifrost and Midgard GPus while now "PanVK" is in development as an open-source Vulkan driver.
When it comes to open-source Arm Mali graphics on Linux, the Panfrost Gallium3D driver is what's talked about the most given that it's for supporting newer generations of Mali graphics hardware. But the Lima Gallium3D driver effort remains ongoing for supporting older Mali 400/450 series hardware.
For those that tend to wait until at least the first point release before moving to a new Mesa feature release, Mesa 21.0.1 is out today while Mesa 20.3.5 was also released as the last of that Q4'2020 driver series.
Consulting firm Igalia continues working on the open-source Broadcom V3DV Mesa Vulkan driver that is most notably used by the Raspberry Pi 4 and later SBCs. Since reaching Vulkan conformance they have continued working on further enhancing the performance of this driver.
With Mesa 21.0 released earlier this month following a one month delay, the Mesa 21.1 release calendar has now been published for that next quarterly feature release.
It's been proposed in the past but never acted upon yet but the idea of dropping/retiring Mesa's "classic" OpenGL drivers from the mainline code-base and letting them potentially live on in an "LTS" branch has once again been brought up.
Mike Blumenkrantz who has been working under contract for Valve as part of their Linux graphics driver initiatives has provided a fresh status report on Zink as the Mesa Gallium3D effort for implementing OpenGL APIs atop Vulkan.
Igalia has outlined some of the recent V3D compiler work they've been engaging in to help with the Vulkan driver performance on the Raspberry Pi 4 while the compiler back-end work also benefits the Mesa OpenGL driver too.
In addition to recent commits improving Mesa's Gallium3D Direct3D 9 "Nine" state tracker and addressing memory issues with 32-bit games, this D3D9 state tracker is now enjoying another performance optimization helping some games.
Following several weeks of delays, Mesa 21.0 was officially released today as the newest quarterly feature update for this collection of predominantly open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers for Linux systems.
Last week Intel wired up Gallium3D threaded context support to their "Iris" OpenGL driver for yielding some sizable performance improvements. Now the Freedreno driver for Qualcomm Adreno hardware has hooked into the threaded context support as well.
The Mesa release train once again rode off the tracks but this week looks like it will get back on track with hopes of releasing Mesa 21.0 on Thursday.
It's been a while since last having anything to report on Waffle as the library abstracting OpenGL and windowing system selection to run-time while this weekend marked its v1.7 release.
For those using Gallium3D Nine as a Direct3D 9 state tracker when running Windows games on Linux rather than the likes of DXVK for going through Vulkan, next quarter's Mesa 21.1 will better handle 32-bit games with the Nine state tracker.
While DXVK has been receiving much attention these days for implementing Direct3D 9/10/11 atop the Vulkan API that can be consumed in a driver agnostic manner, Gallium Nine as a D3D9 state tracker going back years for Mesa continues to receive new work too.
While Mesa is most well known for providing OpenGL and Vulkan open-source drivers on Linux systems, via the "Clover" Gallium3D state tracker is also maturing support for OpenCL. But until now it hasn't been straight-forward to track the state of Mesa's OpenCL supported versions and extensions.
For those enjoying the Valheim, the new survival/sandbox game that has been an incredible success and sold more than four millions of copies so far while being a low-budget indie game, Mesa should be providing better performance when using its OpenGL renderer.
Lavapipe as Mesa's CPU-based Vulkan driver implementation akin to LLVMpipe for OpenGL can now run on Microsoft Windows.
Mesa's on-disk shader cache, which is used for speeding up game load times by avoiding the redundant recompiling of shaders on successive loads and also helping performance for software that compiles shaders on-the-fly, is seeing a big improvement with Mesa 21.1. Mesa 21.1-devel merged this weekend the new single file cache implementation.
2391 Mesa news articles published on Phoronix.