The launch of the new version of Mesa 20.3.0 has just been announced and as in previous versions, the first version of the branch has an experimental state which after the final stabilization of the code, the stable version 20.3.1 will be released.
At Table 20.3 Full OpenGL 4.6 support implemented for Intel GPUs (i965, iris) and AMD (radeonsi) drivers, OpenGL 4.5 support for AMD (r600), NVIDIA (nvc0) and llvmpipe GPUs, OpenGL 4.3 for virgl (virtual GPU Virgil3D for QEMU / KVM), as well as support for Vulkan 1.2 for Intel and AMD cards, and Vulkan 1.0 for VideoCore VI (Raspberry Pi 4).
Table 20.3.0 main novelties
In this new version a v3dv driver is included with support for the VideoCore VI graphics accelerator used in Raspberry Pi 4, Raspberry Pi 400 and Compute Module 4 boards based on the Broadcom BCM2711 chip. Kronos recognizes that the controller fully complies with the Vulkan 1.0 specification.
Package includes a new lavapipe controller with implementation of a software rasterizer for the Vulkan API (similar to llvmpipe, but for Vulkan). Software implementation relies on duplicating calls from the Vulkan API to the Gallium API.
Controller performance and functionality Zink Gallium have increased significantly with the OpenGL API implementation in addition to Vulkan (the driver allows you to get hardware accelerated OpenGL if there are drivers on the system that are limited to supporting only the Vulkan API).
Another change that stands out is in "ACO" in which support for NGG engines has been added (Next Generation Geometry) when working with geometry shaders. The function is implemented in the RADV driver (for AMD cards).
For Intel Haswell GPU, ANV driver adds support for the extension Vulkan Transform Feedback, which allows the DXVK project to use the Direct3D Stream Output API, which is responsible for rendering many surfaces in games.
Added initial support for AMD Dimgrey Cavefish graphics cards (NAVI 23) and Van Gogh APU (RDNA2) on the RadeonSI controller.
Of the other changes that stand out:
- Intel GPU OpenGL and Vulkan drivers add support for the Alder Lake processor family (12th generation).
- Optimized graphics performance on Tiger Lake and Rocket Lake chips (some games and tests, such as the Unreal Engine 4 Vulkan Demo, show 9-12% acceleration).
- The glx_extension_override and indirecto_gl_extension_override settings have been added to driconf, with which you can override the list of available GLX extensions.
- Added layer to translate the intermediate representation (IR) of NIR shaders to the intermediate representation TGSI (Tungsten Graphics Shading Infrastructure).
- The Iris driver for Intel GPUs supports OpenCL kernels (MESA_SHADER_KERNEL) to download calculations next to the GPU.
- Support for the OpenCL 1.2 specification was added to the Clover health tracker with the OpenCL implementation.
- The llvmpipe driver for OpenGL software rendering provides support for OpenGL 4.5.
Finally if you want to know more about it, you can check the following link.
How to install Mesa video drivers on Linux?
Mesa packages found in all Linux distributions, so its installation can be done either by downloading and compiling the source code (All information about it here) or in a relatively simple way, which depends on the availability within the official channels of your distribution or third parties.
For those who are users of Ubuntu, Linux Mint and derivatives they can add the following repository where the drivers are updated quickly.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kisak/kisak-mesa -y
Now we are going to update our list of packages and repositories with:
sudo apt update
And finally we can install the drivers with:
sudo apt upgrade
For the case of those who are Arch Linux users and derivatives, we install them with the following command:
sudo pacman -S mesa mesa-demos mesa-libgl lib32-mesa lib32-mesa-libgl
For whoever they are Fedora 32 users can use this repository, so they must enable corp with:
sudo dnf copr enable grigorig/mesa-stable sudo dnf update
Finally, for those who are openSUSE users, they can install or upgrade by typing:
sudo zypper in mesa