Category: Open Source

A Mesa developer wrote up a blog post about the conformance of the open source Mesa Vulkan driver 'radv' for AMD.

Here’s an interesting one, a developer from NVIDIA noted on the Linux Kernel Mailing List that NVIDIA has been designing some new open source drivers. So I did some digging and got an interesting response.

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.

Okay, so this makes me love the open source itch client even more! The client has been updated to 23.3.0 which include some pretty smart updates.

Seems Valve really are trying to do a big push to get Linux graphics drivers up to scratch. Last night Pierre-Loup tweeted about a new hiring and the name might be familiar to some.

It seems Feral Interactive are continuing to help development of the Vulkan 'radv' AMD driver in Mesa, as they have pushed another patch.

The latest and greatest Mesa release 17.1 is due for release on May 5th, so not long for everything to get polished up.

Strife: Quest for the Sigil was both a critical and commercial disappointment for Rogue Entertainment in 1996, and the source code to the game was mislaid by its developers. Years later work begin on reverse engineering Strife using the released Doom code. Night Dive Studios would later use this community project to craft The Original Strife: Veteran Edition.

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.

The open source racer SuperTuxKart is aiming to get on Steam before Greenlight is closed, so be sure to give it a vote.

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

Unvanquished, the open source humans vs aliens FPS is due to get a massive update soon and it sounds pretty decent.

A new version of The Dark Mod has been released. The new version provides a new introductory map, updated and improved assets, bug fixes and some performance improvements.

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.