Mesa 24.0 Released With Faster Radeon RADV Ray-Tracing & Initial PowerVR Vulkan Driver

Mesa 24.0 made its very punctual debut today as the Q1'2024 feature update to this set of open-source OpenGL, Vulkan, OpenCL, and video acceleration drivers most notably used by Linux systems. From upstreaming of the Imagination PowerVR Vulkan driver to lots of Intel and AMD Radeon improvements as always, Mesa 24.0 is another great update that benefits most Linux desktop users from basic video acceleration and 3D to the most devoted Intel and AMD Linux gamers.

Eric Engestrom continues doing a wonderful job managing the Mesa releases and sticking to the weekly release candidates while today was delightful to see the month end with Mesa 24.0.0 already for its debut. Mesa 24.0 brings the initial Imagination PowerVR Vulkan driver targeting the Rogue architecture. This Vulkan driver goes along with the recently upstreamed PowerVR DRM/KMS kernel driver for Linux that again is targeting Rogue but with time may see broader PowerVR graphics support. Imagination is not developing an open-source OpenGL driver for PowerVR but leaving it to the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation.

Mesa 24.0 also brings many Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver improvements, including faster ray-tracing performance and support for various new extensions. Similarly, the Intel ANV Vulkan driver has also seen support for a number of new Vulkan extensions.

The NVK Vulkan driver added last year to Mesa is also continuing to mature nicely with better performance and additional Vulkan extensions being wired up for this open-source NVIDIA driver. The Rust-written NAK compiler is also part of Mesa 24.0 for NVK.

Mesa 24.0 also includes more work on the Asahi AGX Gallium3D driver for supporting more advanced GL extensions (including OpenGL 3.3 support), the Microsoft D3D12 driver now supports OpenGL 4.6, and various performance optimizations throughout.

The Mesa 24.0 release announcement can be found on the mailing list. The timely release of Mesa 24.0 will mean that it can land safely within Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and other upcoming Linux distribution releases. Mesa 24.1 meanwhile has been in development since earlier this month as the Q2 feature update to these open-source user-space graphics driver components.