The launch of the first version of the branch Table 21.0.0 which has an experimental state and that after the final stabilization of the code, the stable version 21.0.1 will be released.
Mesa 21.0 features full OpenGL 4.6 compatibility for 965, iris (Intel), radeonsi (AMD), zink and llvmpipe drivers. Support for OpenGL 4.5 is available for AMD (r600) and NVIDIA (nvc0) GPUs, and OpenGL 4.3 for virgl (virtual Virgil3D GPU for QEMU / KVM). Vulkan 1.2 is compatible with Intel and AMD cards, and Vulkan 1.0 for VideoCore VI (Raspberry Pi 4).
Table 21.0 main novelties
In this new version the Zink controller (an implementation of the OpenGL API on top of Vulkan) provides support for OpenGL 4.6. Zink enables hardware-accelerated OpenGL if your system has limited drivers to support only the Vulkan API, plus Zink's performance is close to that of native OpenGL implementations.
The Freedreno Controller for the graphics subsystem of Qualcomm chips supports OpenGL ES 3.0 for Adreno a6xx GPU, while the controller Panfrost for Midgard GPU and Bifrost includes OpenGL 3.1 supportas well as OpenGL ES 3.0 support for Bifrost GPUs and the radeonsi driver supports the GL_EXT_demote_to_helper_invocation and GL_NV_compute_shader_derivatives OpenGL extensions.
Another novelty that is presented is that added support for Smart Access Memory technology for Zen 3 and RDNA 2 GPUs and that support was also added for HEVC SAO encoders and AV1 decoders (for RDNA 2 / RX 6000 and only via OpenMAX interface).
The RADV Vulkan Controller adds support for fast packed math (16-bit vectorization) and sparse memory (allows resources like images and textures to be inconsistently placed and reattached to different memory allocations).
The Vulkan V3DV controller, Developed for the VideoCore VI graphics accelerator used in Raspberry Pi 4 boards based on the Broadcom BCM2711 chip, adds Wayland WSI support (Windowing System Integration), which allows access to the Vulkan API from Wayland-based environments.
It is also mentioned that an initial implementation of a layer is adopted that translates OpenGL calls to API DirectX 12 to organize the operation of graphical applications in a WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) environment. In addition, the composition included the spirv_to_dxil library to convert the SPIR-V intermediate rendering shaders into DXIL (DirectX Intermediate Language), developed by Microsoft.
Of the other changes that stand out:
- Optimized performance for RX 6000 series cards is highlighted.
- Intel ANV and Iris drivers add performance optimizations and initial support for Vulkan ray tracing extensions implemented on Xe HPG graphics cards.
- Reworked and greatly improved support for Haiku OS.
- DRI1 support has been removed and the ability to load DRI drivers for Mesa versions below 8.0 has been removed.
- For Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, "mesa_glthread" optimization mode is enabled by default, allowing you to increase performance by 10-20%.
- Optimizations have been implemented that affect the passing of SPECViewPerf tests.
- Added support for the Radeon GPU Profiler (RGP) tool.
- The controller llvmpipe for software rendering includes support for OpenGL 4.6.
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