Category: Drivers

Good news for AMD GPU owners on open source drivers, as Mesa-git now has a shader cache enabled for r600 and radeonsi.

NVIDIA has release the 378.13 stable driver which directly follows on from their work on the 378.09 beta driver.

The recent Mesa release of Mesa 17.0.0 included a patch from a Feral Interactive developer, but Feral aren't stopping there. Another developer from Feral has had two patches accepted into Mesa-git today.

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.

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.