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Mesa 17-rc1 released, it's a massive update for open source graphics

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Mesa 17 (formerly Mesa 13.1) has it's first Release Candidate and it's a pretty big release for users of open source graphic drivers.

Quite a number of people worked on this release, so thank you to everyone who has been a part of improving Mesa!

The official changelog doesn't seem to be ready yet, but hopefully that will either come soon or when Mesa 17 is released in full next month. They have a changelog here for Mesa 17, but I'm unsure how up to date it is.

At the very least it will have:
- OpenGL 4.3 in nouveau Maxwell and above (NVIDIA)
- Haswell (Intel) should see OpenGL 4.5
- Improved performance for Deus Ex Mankind Divided on RadeonSI

There's plenty more, but that's what I remember right now.

See the announcement here. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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kilbith Jan 19, 2017
Correction : OpenGL 4.5 for Intel Haswell. Although that doesn't matter much because games using OpenGL 4.x are generally way too heavy for such a GPU (which I have).


Last edited by kilbith on 19 January 2017 at 4:31 pm UTC
giamic Jan 19, 2017
Mesa 17 more than doubled the performance of my rig with Shadow of Mordor! With a Radeon rx470, it passed from 20 fps (regardless of the graphic quality!) to 45-50 fps at ultra quality. A big thank you to all the developers!
TacoDeBoss Jan 19, 2017
Wh-Why did it go from 13 to 17???
giamic Jan 19, 2017
I was too fast rejoicing: 15 minutes into the game, it crashed badly. :D

@TacoDeBoss: cause it's such a massive improvement.


Naah, just joking. I read that previously names were increased when a new openGL version was supported. Now, with the release of Vulkan, openGL is no longer developed and mesa would be stuck to number 13 forever. So they decided to change and number according to the year of publishing, much like Ubuntu.
numasan Jan 19, 2017
Quoting: TacoDeBossWh-Why did it go from 13 to 17???
I guess you can call it "ubuntuism" or the more old-school "FIFA versioning". 17 is the year the new MESA is released, and I guess 17.1 will signify the first update of the release that year.
Liam Dawe Jan 19, 2017
Quoting: kilbithCorrection : OpenGL 4.5 for Intel Haswell. Although that doesn't matter much because games using OpenGL 4.x are generally way too heavy for such a GPU (which I have).
As far as I can tell, that patch was not taken into Mesa-git in time for branching? That's from the dev list, not the actual git commit list.

Edit: Even the linked release notes only mention 4.2.


Last edited by Liam Dawe on 19 January 2017 at 8:26 pm UTC
kilbith Jan 19, 2017
Quoting: liamdawe
Quoting: kilbithCorrection : OpenGL 4.5 for Intel Haswell. Although that doesn't matter much because games using OpenGL 4.x are generally way too heavy for such a GPU (which I have).
As far as I can tell, that patch was not taken into Mesa-git in time for branching? That's from the dev list, not the actual git commit list.

Edit: Even the linked release notes only mention 4.2.

That patch actually landed 3 days ago into the Mesa 17.0 branch, as you can see there.
Liam Dawe Jan 19, 2017
Quoting: kilbith
Quoting: liamdawe
Quoting: kilbithCorrection : OpenGL 4.5 for Intel Haswell. Although that doesn't matter much because games using OpenGL 4.x are generally way too heavy for such a GPU (which I have).
As far as I can tell, that patch was not taken into Mesa-git in time for branching? That's from the dev list, not the actual git commit list.

Edit: Even the linked release notes only mention 4.2.

That patch actually landed 3 days ago into the Mesa 17.0 branch, as you can see there.
Ah nice, edited the article. Thanks!

I'm still getting to grips with the mailing lists and how their commits work.
TacoDeBoss Jan 20, 2017
Quoting: giamicI was too fast rejoicing: 15 minutes into the game, it crashed badly. :D

@TacoDeBoss: cause it's such a massive improvement.


Naah, just joking. I read that previously names were increased when a new openGL version was supported. Now, with the release of Vulkan, openGL is no longer developed and mesa would be stuck to number 13 forever. So they decided to change and number according to the year of publishing, much like Ubuntu.

Hmm, interesting.
Good to see improvements to Mesa since I've recently switched over to AMD for my main Linux machine.
Grinder Jan 20, 2017
And for Ivy Bridge, any update?
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