Category: 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.

Samuel Pitoiset (Valve developer) just put some fresh work into Mesa-git that enables OpenGL 4.3 with nouveau (NVIDIA) for Maxwell and above.

Mesa is continuing to progress rapidly, as of today Haswell should now support OpenGL 4.2 ready for the next release of Mesa.

Andres Rodriguez sent in a message to the mesa-dev mailing list announcing 'gputool' for debugging AMD graphics cards on Linux. It's also open source under the GPL, so that's awesome.

Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais has tweeted out asking for information on Linux games that don't currently work with radeonsi.

Mesa has another patch that will be interesting for Linux gamers. This is actually a two-part fix as it was re-worked. The Witcher 2 should have a lot less black flickering with this latest patch.

If you had tried playing XCOM: Enemy Unknown (not to be confused with XCOM 2) on radeonsi and had it crash constantly, the good news is that this should now be fixed as of Mesa 13.0.3.

Divinity: Original Sin is one game that the open source Mesa drivers currently cannot run without hacks, but it looks like the Mesa team has been testing it.

I recently pointed out that Marek sent in patches to the Mesa list which could improve Deus Ex: Mankind Divided performance on RadeonSI around 70%, well all of the patches are now in Mesa git.

The open source OpenGL implementation Mesa has a new release 13.0.3 which, as the minor version bump indicates, brings a number of bug fixes to RadeonSI and Intel.

The Mesa developers are as usual continuing their effort to get the open source Linux graphic drivers up to scratch. Intel Haswell (gen7) now has support for OpenGL 4.

Marek sent in a patch for RadeonSI that will look to increase performance of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided by around 70%.

System76, the Linux hardware supplier for laptops, desktops and more has been working with NVIDIA on fixing up their drivers.

Nvidia have pushed out three new driver updates today. One for their latest stable branch and two for older hardware.

Sad news for fans of Roccat hardware as the sole developer working on Roccat device support, Stefan Achatz, is stepping down from his work.

This is quite an amazing little fix. Marek sent in a patch for Mesa that fixes a bug that has apparently been an issue for around 9 years.

As expected (from the leak), AMD has pushed out AMDGPU-PRO 16.50 for Linux which includes FreeSync support along with support for a wider set of cards.