It has been a while since we officially spoke to Feral Interactive about their Linux ports, with the last time being in June 2014. It’s time to get reacquainted and see where things stand right now.
The code for OpenGL threaded GL dispatch is now finally in Mesa-git, after multiple developers attempts to fix it up. This should improve performance in multiple games for users of the open source Mesa drivers.
It seems Feral Interactive are busy bees behind the scenes towards something, as one of their developers has sent in another patch for the Mesa 'radv' Vulkan driver.
The latest and greatest Mesa release 17.1 is due for release on May 5th, so not long for everything to get polished up.
DiRT Rally seemed to have an issue with rendering properly in certain cases with newer versions of LLVM with RadeonSI Mesa (AMD), but it seems to have been tracked down as an issue in LLVM.
The work on the threaded GL dispatch code for Mesa has been picked up by Timothy Arceri as Marek is now busy with other work.
Since we get a few comments here and there asking what Mesa is and what graphics cards will use it, here’s my attempt at clearing it up for you.
I'm sure plenty of you will be happy with this, as Mesa now has the shader cache enabled by default in Mesa-git to allow for wider testing. It may be turned off for Mesa 17.1, if wider testing shows issues with it.
Good news for AMD GPU owners on open source drivers, as Mesa-git now has a shader cache enabled for r600 and radeonsi.
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.
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.
