Category: Drivers

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.

Feral Interactive's call for a stable Mesa PPA has already made progress, as there's now a stable PPA available for Mesa.

AMD have announced that they are working on a big driver update. The Linux driver will support FreeSync and have wider support for their different GPUs.

It seems NVIDIA are preparing a new driver update that will enable the use of Vulkan without needing X11.

Just a word of warning, the Nvidia 375.20 driver seems to have quite a number of issues in certain games bringing performance down a lot.

As always, I am massively impressed with the progress the Mesa developers have made. The open source Vulkan driver 'radv' has continued to evolve recently.

The latest Nvidia driver 375.20 is now available. The interesting change is that it increases the OpenGL shader cache size, which may help with games like Deus Ex Mankind Divided on Linux.

Not long after the big Mesa 13 release, we have a release candidate ready for a point release. It's an interesting one too, as it will include a performance improvement to the Intel Vulkan driver, as well as assorted bug fixes.

This release is a bit massive when it comes to actually looking at the features. Everything we have been hyped about recently is now in the stable release.

Marek, the well known contributor to Mesa has been working on some form of Mesa OpenGL threading, and his test showed a 70% improvement for Borderlands 2.

A recent commit to Mesa that improves performance in radeonsi was emailed in, as it mentions Batman: Arkham Origins in a list of tested games, where all of them are native on Linux apart from that one game. Updated: no it isn't.

It looks like in the last few days the 'nvc0' driver for Nvidia cards in Mesa has hit OpenGL 4.5 compatibility, joining Intel and AMD.

As of today Mesa now has full OpenGL 4.4 support (with 4.5 already done) for both AMD radeonsi and Intel (i965/gen8+). Mesa won't actually expose any higher than OpenGL 4.3 until Mesa (well, someone) pays up for the Conformance Tests.

The AMD developer Marek Olšák sent over a patch to Mesa for the AMD radeonsi driver that he found by luck, and it improves DiRT: Showdown on Ultra settings by 15%. It's likely of course that this can help other games too.

Something I entirely missed when writing about Mesa and OpenGL, is that the open source Vulkan driver "radv" has been merged into Mesa.

The open source OpenGL driver AMD radeonsi is now extremely close to having full OpenGL 4.4 support, and OpenGL 4.5 is now complete.

It seems Wargame: European Escalation was broken for nearly two years for Nvidia GPU users on Linux. The recent Nvidia 370.28 driver seems to have fixed it.

A pretty good milestone has been achieved with the open source Vulkan driver for AMD that Dave Airlie has been working on with Bas Nieuwenhuizen. It can now run Dota 2.

Marek Olšák has recently sent word to the AMD mailing list that they have found a reason for some games performing poorly using Mesa. Another developer noted that a patch is already in progress.

For those of you using the RadeonSI driver for AMD graphics cards, you may be interested to know that a developer named Marek has sent in patches to significantly improve performance for Bioshock Infinite.