Mesa 17.3 Officially Released: Nearly OpenGL 4.6, Better Vulkan Support

Delays pushed back the Mesa 17.3 release from November, but this quarterly update to the Mesa 3D graphics stack is now available for users.

Mesa 17.3 is another significant update this year for the open-source graphics drivers. Mesa 17.3 offers nearly complete OpenGL 4.6 support for RadeonSI / Intel / Nouveau NVC0 drivers with the notable exception of the SPIR-V ingestion support yet not being complete. Mesa 17.3 also contains significant improvements to the Radeon RADV and Intel ANV Vulkan drivers with new extension support, performance optimizations, and all important fixes.

Other Mesa 17.3 work includes stabilizing the Radeon RX Vega support in both RadeonSI/RADV, continued work on next-gen Intel graphics hardware support, OpenGL threading support for select games, experimental NIR support in the RadeonSI Driver, and other work as already outlined in our extensive Mesa 17.3 feature overview.

Also notable is S3TC support in Mesa 17.3 now that its patent finally expired for this means of texture compression.

Mesa 17.3.0 can be downloaded here while Mesa 18.0 will be the next release due out in Q1.

Our year-end Mesa benchmark recaps and other annual testing will be up on Phoronix soon.