You can sign up to get a daily email of our articles, see the Mailing List page.
We do often include affiliate links to earn us some pennies. See more here.

Mesa 21.3 drivers out, plus NVIDIA 470.62.12 Vulkan Beta for Linux

By - | Views: 15,274

Two sets of driver releases are now available. First we have the open source Mesa 21.3 release and we also secondly have the NVIDIA Vulkan Beta 470.62.12 also out now.

For the Mesa 21.3 release it pulls in a number of new features and performance improvements. Some of the highlights include:

  • Experimental Ray Tracing for AMD RADV (Vulkan). Don't go getting too excited though, it's still pretty rough and needs plenty of continued performance work.
  • NGG (Next Generation Geometry) shader-based culling is now enabled by default on RDNA2 / GFX10.3 GPUs for RADV. Should help improve performance.
  • The Zink driver that runs OpenGL over Vulkan had tons of work done, with it now supporting GLES 3.2.
  • Intel Iris now has threaded shader compilation.
  • Panfrost (Mali GPUs) now officially conforms to the GLES 3.1 standard.
  • VA-API gained support for AV1 videos.
  • A Wayland workaround for transparency.
  • Plus a bunch more Vulkan and OpenGL extensions supported across RADV, Intel, lavapipe and llvmpipe.

Over on the NVIDIA side for the developer-focused Vulkan Beta 470.62.12 they added support for these new extensions:

Additionally the Vulkan Video APIs were updates to version 1.2.199 and they also updated Vulkan Video Capabilities according to the new Video spec. Plus there's fixes for 64-bit atomics not working under some conditions and the driver also now handles the very long-named VkRenderingFragmentShadingRateAttachmentInfoKHR.imageView (try saying that fast three times!) with a VK_NULL_HANDLE correctly.

Note: as it's aimed at developers, NVIDIA users will usually just want to stick with their mainline drivers with either 495.44 or 470.86.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
17 Likes
About the author -
author picture
I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
See more from me
The comments on this article are closed.
8 comments

TheRiddick Nov 18, 2021
I tried to get RT working on CONTROL with my 6800XT but all it did was create a blackscreen and lock my desktop up among other things..
VitalyR Nov 18, 2021
495.44 and 470.86 is in stable, 470.62.12 is in beta… I’m totally confused.
Liam Dawe Nov 18, 2021
Quoting: VitalyR495.44 and 470.86 is in stable
They have two stable driver series, one of which gets the big new features, while the other seems to mainly stick to bug fixes.

Quoting: VitalyR470.62.12 is in beta
As noted, it's a developer-focused Beta, for where new Vulkan work gets added first for developers to test. Stick with stable drivers.


Last edited by Liam Dawe on 18 November 2021 at 3:43 pm UTC
mrdeathjr Nov 18, 2021
In my case works with xubuntu 22.04 lts, and with kernel 5.15 (recently added in updates)








Last edited by mrdeathjr on 18 November 2021 at 6:32 pm UTC
Avehicle7887 Nov 18, 2021
Any AMD user managed to get ray tracing working? Speaking of Control in specific.

Steps I've taken so far:

- Compiled Mesa 21.3.0
- Downloaded VKD3D-Proton
- Made sure the game is running DX12 not DX11 (I've even renamed the DX11 exe to make sure it doesn't launch it).
- Running recent Wine (6.19) with a clean prefix.
- Overrides used "d3d12.dll and "d3dcompiler_47".
- Wine Prefix is set to 'Windows 10'
- "export RADV_PERFTEST=rt" is also enabled.

Despite all that, the Ray Tracing option is grayed out and I'm at a loss what I could be missing.

Aside from that, everything is working as expected with OpenGL and DXVK.

Any help would be appreciated :)


Last edited by Avehicle7887 on 18 November 2021 at 8:41 pm UTC
whizse Nov 18, 2021
View PC info
  • Supporter
Quoting: Avehicle7887Any help would be appreciated :)
I think you used to have to set VKD3D_CONFIG=dxr (or dxr11) to enable it in VKD3D?

Might want to check the logs from Wine/VKD3D if that doesn't work.
Avehicle7887 Nov 18, 2021
Quoting: whizse
Quoting: Avehicle7887Any help would be appreciated :)
I think you used to have to set VKD3D_CONFIG=dxr (or dxr11) to enable it in VKD3D?

Might want to check the logs from Wine/VKD3D if that doesn't work.

Thank you, that was it. I used the 'dxr11' option.

------

For anyone curious how Control looks and performs with RT on at max details here's a couple of screenshots:

RT Off:


RT On (highest settings):
TheRiddick Nov 19, 2021
Quoting: Avehicle7887Despite all that, the Ray Tracing option is grayed out and I'm at a loss what I could be missing.


You may have forgot about the below. With my 6800XT, it crashes the desktop, major failure.
VKD3D_CONFIG=dxr or dxr11

I don't know why my system completely folds over with RT. Makes no sense.

Also in those screenshots, doesn't seem very noticeable.


Last edited by TheRiddick on 19 November 2021 at 1:18 am UTC
While you're here, please consider supporting GamingOnLinux on:

Reward Tiers: Patreon. Plain Donations: PayPal.

This ensures all of our main content remains totally free for everyone! Patreon supporters can also remove all adverts and sponsors! Supporting us helps bring good, fresh content. Without your continued support, we simply could not continue!

You can find even more ways to support us on this dedicated page any time. If you already are, thank you!
The comments on this article are closed.