The announcement of the launch of the new version of the free implementation of OpenGL and Vulkan, "Table 20.0.0". Being this version the first version of the new branch 20.xx and that it is also is considered in an experimental state Since then the final stable version of the code will be released, which will be released in “Table 20.0.1”.
For those unaware of the Mesa controllers, you should know that these are open source Linux software available for AMD, NVIDIA and Intel hardware. Mesa's project began as an open source implementation of the OpenGL specification (a system for rendering interactive 3D graphics).
Through the years, the project grew to implement more graphics APIs, including OpenGL ES (versions 1, 2, 3), OpenCL, OpenMAX, VDPAU, VA API, XvMC, and Vulkan. A variety of controllers of devices allows Mesa libraries to be used in many different environments, from software emulation to complete hardware acceleration for modern GPUs.
Mesa implements a vendor-independent translation layer between a graphics API such as OpenGL and the graphics drivers in the kernel of the operating system.
What's new in Mesa 20.0.0?
In this new version of the Mesa 20.0 controllers.0 full OpenGL 4.6 support is provided for Intel i965 and AMD radeonsi GPUs, OpenGL 4.5 support for AMD (r600) and NVIDIA (nvc0) GPUs, as well as Vulkan 1.2 support for Intel and AMD cards.
The RADV and ANV drivers for AMD GPUs and Intel support the Vulkan 1.2 graphics API, while RADV and ACO provide a compilation of geometric shaders. In RADV and ACO for GPU GFX10 (Navi) supports Wave32 mode.
For Intel GPUs based on Broadwell and Skylake microarchitectures (Gen8+), the new Iris driver is used by default, which has reached parity with the i965 controller in its capabilities.
The Iris controller is based on the Gallium3D architecture, which brings memory management tasks to the DRI driver in the Linux kernel and provides an out-of-the-box health tracker with support for output object cache reuse. PFor chips based on older microarchitectures, up to and including Haswell, the i965 controller is left.
RADV (Vulkan driver for AMD chips) and a back-end for compiling "ACO" shaders, developed by Valve as an alternative to the LLVM shader compiler, added support for GCN 1.0 / GFX6 (Southern Islands) and GCN 1.1 generations of GPUs / GFX7.
LLVMpipe and RadeonSI drivers have been converted to use intermediate rendering no type (IR) of NIR shaders, intended to work at the lowest level, under GLSL IR and internal IR table. Optimized NIR performance.
Of the other changes that are mentioned:
- Live-cache support has been added to the RadeonSI driver, which ensures the detection of duplicate compiled hatch objects.
- OpenGL and Vulkan drivers for Intel GPUs added support for Gen11 (Jasper Lake) chips.
- The V3D driver (for Raspberry Pi) added support for geometric shaders corresponding to OpenGL ES 3.2, and full support was provided for OpenGL ES 3.1.
- Tulip Vulkan driver performance optimization for Qualcomm Adreno GPUs.
If you want to know more about it, you can consult the following link.
How to install Mesa video drivers on Linux?
Mesa packages found in all Linux distributions, so its installation is relatively simple.
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:paulo-miguel-dias/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 28 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