Mesa News Archives

The newest feature addition for Mesa 25.3 is enabling support 8x multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) within the LLVMpipe software rasterizer.

With Mesa 25.2.1 recently having been released, the prior quarter's Mesa 25.1 series is now drawing to a close. Excellent Mesa release manager Eric Engestrom released Mesa 25.1.9 as one last point release for Mesa 25.1 before ending this branch.

Being worked on for a number of months now is GL_EXT_mesh_shader as an extension for bringing mesh shaders to OpenGL. This is an alternative to NVIDIA's GL_NV_mesh_shader extension being worked on for Mesa drivers and in particular the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

Following the release of Mesa 25.2 from two weeks ago, Mesa 25.2.1 is out now as the first point release. Mesa 25.2.1 is quite heavy on bug fixes and some other notable back-ports from Mesa 25.3-devel.

While there is already MoltenVK for Vulkan implemented over Apple's Metal graphics API, the graphics engineers at LunarG have announced KosmicKrisp as a Mesa-based driver implementing Vulkan over Metal.

Mesa 25.2 is now available as the newest quarterly feature release for this set of open-source Linux graphics drivers predominantly for OpenGL, Vulkan, and video acceleration support on the Linux desktop.

Merged a short time ago to Mesa 25.3-devel Git and marked for back-porting to the Mesa 25.2 series is advertising Vulkan 1.4 conformance for NVIDIA's latest Blackwell GPUs.

The third weekly release candidate of Mesa 25.2 is now available for testing ahead of its planned stable release in August.

Following the Vulkanised 2025 presentation how NVIDIA is finding great success with Vulkan for AI / machine learning and already competitive to CUDA in some areas, Red Hat engineer and DRM subsystem lead maintainer David Airlie began exploring the potential of Mesa Vulkan drivers for AI inferencing. He was successful in using the Intel ANV, NVIDIA NVK, and Radeon RADV drivers for Vulkan-based AI inferencing while for the Radeon hardware tested is where it's showing the most potential (performance) at the moment and for even competing with the ROCm compute stack.

An exciting addition landing into the Mesa 25.3 codebase today is support for AMD's Vulkan anti-lag extension, VK_AMD_anti_lag.

Eric Engestrom just released Mesa 25.2-rc2 as the newest, on-time weekly release candidate for this quarter's Mesa 25.2 feature series.

A nearly five year old merge request was merged today to Mesa Git for Q4's Mesa 25.3 release. This merge transitions the Vulkan windowing system integration (WSI) from using the DRM "legacy" kernel mode-setting APIs over to the modern atomic mode-setting interfaces.

Mesa 25.2 entered its feature freeze yesterday with many exciting driver improvements with new features and performance optimizations while one feature that wasn't ready for merging in this quarter's release is Magma, which is a recent effort by Google engineers working on a cross-platform system call interface for Mesa. And it's written in Rust.

In addition to releasing Mesa 25.2-rc1 with its many new features to test, Mesa release manager Eric Engestrom today released Mesa 25.1.6 as the newest bi-weekly stable point release for last quarter's series.

Mesa 25.2 is now branched and thus under a feature freeze and with Mesa 25.2-rc1 having just been released. This marks the start of weekly release candidates until the Mesa 25.2 stable release is ready to ship sometime in August.

It's a very busy week for the open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers leading up to the Mesa 25.2 code branching. On top of RADV ray-tracing improvements, Vulkan 1.2 conformance for Kepler GPUs, Xe3 Panther Lake graphics enabled by default, and many other last minute changes, over the past week has also been a push getting more AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 "FSR 4" improvements merged for the Radeon RADV driver.

Last week I wrote about a number of patches coming out of AMD for Next-Gen Geometry "NGG" improvements to the AMD OpenGL and Vulkan drivers for Linux. Some of that code hadn't been merged as of writing but fortunately this week the remainder of the NGG improvements were successfully merged to Mesa Git for this quarter's Mesa 25.2 release.

OpenGL doesn't receive nearly as much love these days as the Vulkan API, but over the past several months there's been at least one notable new extension in the works: cross-vendor mesh shader support with the pending GL_EXT_mesh_shader extension. Beginning today the AMD RadeonSI Gallium3D upstreaming process has begun for introducing mesh shader support for this Radeon OpenGL driver.

A big merge today to Mesa Git ahead of next week's Mesa 25.2 code branching is removing the pre-DMA-BUF winsys support and as part of that clearing out all of the old DRI2 driver support.

The Mesa 25.2 code is expected to be branched next week to kick off the release process for this quarter's iteration of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers. As such, there's going to be a mad dash over the next week to land lingering features and other improvements for Mesa 25.2. Making it into Mesa Git today was a big set of 42 patches for the Imagination PowerVR Vulkan driver.

Mike Blumenkrantz with Valve's Linux graphics driver team continues working on enhancements to Mesa's Zink driver for OpenGL implemented over the Vulkan API. A new merge request is further enhancing OpenGL and Vulkan interoperability by supporting the GL_NV_timeline_semaphore extension.

The Mesa 25.2 release that will likely be out as stable in August should have nice initial support for the newest NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, namely used by the GeForce RTX 50 series, with the NVK open-source driver for Vulkan usage.

The RADV Vulkan driver's ray-tracing performance has improved a lot over time such as shown within yesterday's RADV vs. AMDVLK performance comparison on Strix Point. Coincidentally, merged today is yet another ray-tracing optimization to benefit RDNA3 (GFX11) and newer AMD graphics processors.

The Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has merged support for the VK_NV_cooperative_matrix2 NVIDIA Vulkan extension but it's hidden by default and only partially supported with a focus on helping FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 and VKD3D-Proton.

Adding to the many graphics driver features to look forward to with next quarter's Mesa 25.2 release is now Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

The RADV open-source Radeon Vulkan driver within Mesa supports GFX9/Vega graphics cards but not the later CDNA-based Instinct accelerators. However, some patches merged today for Mesa 25.2-devel did introduce some "random bits and pieces" for CDNA but not a full implementation.

Eric Engestrom released Mesa 25.1.4 on Wednesday as the latest bi-weekly point release for this collection of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers predominantly used on Linux systems.

Mesa's Rusticl OpenCL driver has supported various elements of 2D image handling while the latest addition in enhancing this open-source driver's support is for sRGB images.

Posted by Intel engineers a few days ago were a Mesa patch to begin recognizing some Intel Battlemage graphics cards as being the larger "BMG G31" variant. This evening those patches were merged for Mesa 25.2 for what's rumored to be potentially the Arc B770 graphics cards to launch later in the year.

Prominent AMD Mesa developer Marek Olšák this week landed a number of fixes for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver code in working to enable medium precision "mediump" support for this open-source graphics driver.

It was just earlier this week that Mesa 25.1.2 arrived as the newest bi-weekly bug-fix release for these open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers. Coming out today is an emergency bug-fix release to fix a regression affecting AMD Radeon RX 9000 series RDNA4 graphics card owners.

Mesa's modern Rust-written OpenCL driver for Gallium3D "Rusticl" has closed one of the few remaining gaps with the former Clover OpenCL state tracker. Merged today for Mesa 25.2 is native FP16 support.

Mesa 25.1.2 is out today as the newest stable bi-weekly point release to this collection of open-source OpenGL/Vulkan/video drivers widely relied upon by Linux systems.

Rusticl as Mesa's Rust-based OpenCL driver implementation for Gallium3D drivers is ending the month of May on a high note... Merged this week was support for the Intel Subgroups OpenCL extension (cl_intel_subgroups) and before getting to that on my TODO list, an even bigger item was merged: Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support.

Eric Engestrom just released Mesa 25.0.7 as the newest bi-weekly point release to the Mesa 25.0 series that is also the end of the road for that Q1'2025 release branch.

While there was the big 62k lines of code patch from Microsoft merged yesterday to Mesa, separately there was also some code cleaning to remove some previously-deprecated code from the codebase.

Back in April Mesa deprecated Gallium Nine alongside the XA state tracker used for X.Org Server acceleration. Gallium-XA was developed by VMware for use with their DDX driver for accelerating X11 within their virtualized environments. XA isn't really used these days and the generic GLAMOR code is in much better shape. Thus Mesa is now no longer building the XA code as the next step toward its removal.

Following the Mesa 25.1 stable release from earlier this month, Mesa 25.1.1 is now available as the first point release bringing an assortment of different OpenGL and Vulkan driver fixes.

The Rust-written NAK shader compiler used by Mesa's NVK open-source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA GPUs has merged support for SM32 as the "KeplerB" / Kepler 2.0 graphics processors.

Mesa developer Konstantin Seurer has been adding more features to the Lavapipe Vulkan driver for functionality needed by VKD3D-Proton for mapping Direct3D 12 APIs atop Vulkan.

Mesa 25.1 is out today as the new quarterly feature release for this set of open-source user-space graphics drivers primarily consisting of OpenGL and Vulkan driver support on Linux systems.

Eric Engestrom with Igalia continues doing a superb job managing the Mesa releases with today bringing the timely Mesa 25.1-rc3 release candidate as well as the new Mesa 25.0.5 stable point release.

Merged a few minutes ago to the Mesa 25.2-devel graphics driver code for the open-source Intel "ANV" Vulkan Linux driver is proper memory pool support. In turn this can deliver some magnificent performance improvements on the likes of Lunar Lake and other newer Intel graphics processors.

Following recent Vulkan 1.1 support within Mesa for the PanVK driver for open-source Arm Mali Vulkan driver support, Vulkan 1.2 is now being advertised.

Mesa has supported on-disk shader cache for years to help speed-up game load times and overall system efficiencies. They had shifted from a multi-file cache layout to a single file cache for greater space savings. Steam also added support for the single-file cache. But now upstream Mesa is shifting back from the single-file cache default to the multi-file cache over performance issues.

Mesa 25.1-rc2 is now available for testing as the newest weekly test version of this collection of OpenGL and Vulkan drivers. Mesa 25.1 continues working its way toward a stable release in May.

Mesa's NVK Vulkan driver had been Vulkan 1.4 conformant for Turing and newer GPUs, but now with Mesa 25.2-devel it's Vulkan 1.4 conformant going back to Maxwell GPUs. This change is exported to be back-ported to the upcoming Mesa 25.1 release as well for those interested in using this open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver.

Now that Mesa 25.1 is branched for this quarter's Mesa 3D feature release, Mesa 25.2 has entered development on the main Git branch. One of the first merged changes for Mesa 25.2 is removing the old OpenCL Gallium3D "Clover" driver.

Eric Engestrom is once again stepping up to manage the next quarterly Mesa driver feature release and thus today we have the on-time branching of Mesa 25.1 from Mesa Git and already the release of Mesa 25.1-rc1. This release brings many improvements to the collection of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers that should be ready for their stable debut in May.

Additional improvements for AMD GFX12 as the graphics engine IP of RDNA4 graphics with the Radeon RX 9000 series have been merged ahead of this quarter's Mesa 25.1 feature release.