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Mesa 17.0.0 has officially released and it's well worth updating

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The Mesa developers have announced the release of Mesa 17.0.0 and it's a truly incredible release. You should probably update as soon as possible.

For those that don't know what Mesa is: you will be using Mesa if you're on Intel graphics, most likely with an AMD GPU and also some older NVIDIA models. You are not using Mesa if you install AMD/NVIDIA proprietary drivers.

There's a lot of new features, as well as performance work for multiple titles included.

Here's some highlights:
RADV
- Support multiple devices
Mesa core
- Noticeable refactoring en route to GLSL Shader Cache
i965
- OpenGL 4.5 support on Haswell hardware
nouveau
- OpenGL 4.3 support on Maxwell hardware
- Improved performance due to instruction pipelining (Maxwell)
r600/radeonsi
- VCE: Handle H.264 level 5.2
- Polaris12 support
- Dozens of performance improvements

They had around 2,500 commits from around 120 people, so a lot went into this major new release.

Also, fun fact: Feral Interactive's Marc Di Luzio had a patch accepted for Mesa 17:
QuoteMarc Di Luzio (1):
glsl: correct compute shader checks for memoryBarrier functions

Fantastic work from all involved. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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ziabice Feb 13, 2017
Time to celebrate! \o/
View video on youtube.com
riusma Feb 13, 2017
For Ubuntu 16.04 users, Mesa 17 should be backported to 16.04.3 point release (and will be available in 17.04), and there is a new "official" ppa with Mesa 13.0.4 by Timo Aaltonen (source from reading a Softpedia article. :)
NoYzE Feb 13, 2017
Is there any good resource about what mesa actually is? I think i am using nvidia libgl, so is a new mesa version affecting me in any way or is it just for the amd folks?
Aurelien Feb 13, 2017
Can someone tell me if Ark Survival Evolved can run on HASWELL plateform with those driver ?
soulsource Feb 13, 2017
Quoting: NoYzEIs there any good resource about what mesa actually is? I think i am using nvidia libgl, so is a new mesa version affecting me in any way or is it just for the amd folks?
Yep, the FAQ on the Mesa homepage, although that's slightly dated information. If you are using the nVidia proprietary drivers, Mesa is not relevant for you, as the proprietary nVidia driver ships a complete graphics stack, that basically replaces all open-source components.
For modern Intel hardware, there is basically one Linux driver, the OpenGL (and Vulkan, and OpenCL) component of which is part of Mesa. The same is true for the open source AMD driver (which also has parts in the llvm project, namely the shader compiler). The proprietary AMD driver replaces the OpenGL (and Vulkan, and OpenCL) driver of Mesa, but uses the open source AMDGPU Kernel module.
STiAT Feb 13, 2017
Very nice, I think I'll get it pretty soon on either Manjaro or Solus. Not interested in packaging it myself to test.

Congratulations on that milestone to the Mesa developers & people involved. Good to see how much positive "attention" by amd/intel/valve/game devs is on Mesa at the moment.


Last edited by STiAT on 13 February 2017 at 4:54 pm UTC
Shmerl Feb 13, 2017
Also, good to see the positive trend of growing Mesa usage among GOL users: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/users/statistics#trends
M@GOid Feb 13, 2017
For those using Ubuntu and its derivatives, Padoka's PPA for Mesa stable releases is available:

https://launchpad.net/~paulo-miguel-dias/+archive/ubuntu/pkppa
wolfyrion Feb 13, 2017
Quoting: soulsource
Quoting: NoYzEIs there any good resource about what mesa actually is? I think i am using nvidia libgl, so is a new mesa version affecting me in any way or is it just for the amd folks?
Yep, the FAQ on the Mesa homepage, although that's slightly dated information. If you are using the nVidia proprietary drivers, Mesa is not relevant for you, as the proprietary nVidia driver ships a complete graphics stack, that basically replaces all open-source components.
For modern Intel hardware, there is basically one Linux driver, the OpenGL (and Vulkan, and OpenCL) component of which is part of Mesa. The same is true for the open source AMD driver (which also has parts in the llvm project, namely the shader compiler). The proprietary AMD driver replaces the OpenGL (and Vulkan, and OpenCL) driver of Mesa, but uses the open source AMDGPU Kernel module.

I think that all graphic card driver developers are affected by each MESA upgrade , NVIDIA , AMD , Intel etc in one way or another.
I will explain... for example NVIDIA Proprietary drivers.

Each upgrade of Mesa affects NVIDIA because it has to do with OpenGL,VULKAN, OPENCL and so on.
I beleive that all the graphic developers contribute to MESA and at the end they will use the open source code and integrate it into their own proprietary drivers.

Well maybe I am wrong though.. if someone can shed some light on this ..


Last edited by wolfyrion on 13 February 2017 at 5:53 pm UTC
tuxintuxedo Feb 13, 2017
Closed source drivers have nothing to do with Mesa. Also, Nvidia doesn't care about Mesa at all.
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