Category: Drivers

You may remember recently I wrote about 'threaded GL dispatch' in Mesa possibly getting merged, after AMD's Marek suggested it and there was some backlash, well, it has continued.

Just a note to not get overly excited about threaded OpenGL in Mesa. While it's true it could help a bunch of games, there's also games it likely won't help or even make worse. Feral Interactive's ports already do it, and I'm sure others do too.

Marek, the Mesa developer from AMD posted a message to the public Mesa-dev mailing list asking to merge the threaded GL dispatch code and get it cleaned up to help with the high CPU overhead of Mesa.

Samuel Pitoiset from Valve has sent in yet another patch to Mesa, this one focuses on the ARK games: ARK Survival Evolved and Survival Of The Fittest to to run without overrides.

The latest point release for the stable Mesa version is now available as 13.0.4. It brings in fixes for multiple drivers.

Mesa is progressing nicely as usual and I've been keeping an eye on the mailing list for anything interesting. It seems Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and Tomb Raider have both seen some more performance tuning.

AMDGPU-PRO 16.60 is now officially available for AMD GPU owners and it adds support for even more cards including GCN 1.0.

In addition to Mesa 17 getting a new release candidate, we also today have a Mesa 13.0.4 release candidate which should be released on Friday.

Emil Velikov has announced the second release candidate for Mesa 17, the next stable version of the open source graphics drivers on Linux.

Game porter Timothee Besset, who did the Rocket League port, has posted on the bug report about Rocket League freezing up a lot on Mesa to note that he has started working on the issue.

This will probably be to the delight of many AMD graphics card owners who use the open source Mesa graphics drivers: A patch has been sent into the Mesa-dev mailing list for radeonsi to 'Add disk shader cache'.

Mesa 12.0.6 has released and it brings with it a bunch of bug fixes. While the latest stable version is Mesa 13.0.3, those sticking with the older Mesa 12 will still like their fixes.

Marek Olšák sent in another patch to Mesa that is now in Mesa-git which should hopefully be a better fix for black transitions in The Witcher 2 on radeonsi (AMD).

Samuel Pitoiset (Valve) discovered an issue in radeonsi (Mesa) that Marek Olšák has now patched up and is already in Mesa-git.

Dave Airlie sent in a massive patch-set of 31 patches for 'radv', the open source AMD Vulkan driver, to support geometry shaders.

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.

A pretty interesting NVIDIA beta driver has landed and it officially enables their OpenGL threaded optimizations by default.

Mesa 17, the next stable release of the open source graphics drivers on Linux has been a bit delayed, due to so much last minute work going on. Looks like Intel Ivy Bridge will get OpenGL 4.0.

A commit that just landed in Mesa-git allows for 'radv', the open source Vulkan driver for AMD GPUs to use multiple devices.

In another push towards Mesa finishing OpenGL for all vendors where possible, Intel Haswell chips now have support for OpenGL 4.5 with Mesa on Linux.