Guy Lunardi Mesa 17 & OpenGL 4.5

Mesa 17.0, the latest release of the open source 3D graphics library was made available this February 2017.

With nearly 2,500 commits from over 120 developers, Mesa 17.0 is without a doubt a hefty upgrade over the previous development release. It also brings a new versioning scheme reflecting the release year

For the first time an open source driver meets all the latest conformance test suites for OpenGL, OpenGL ES and now Vulkan, a feat achieved through significant investments in Mesa over the years.

Key features of this latest release include OpenGL 4.5 support for Intel Haswell, Open GL 4.3 support for NVIDIA Maxwell, support for multiple devices with the Radeon Vulkan driver (RADV), and Float64 support as well as tessellation shader support with the Intel Vulkan driver (ANV).

The RadeonSi driver received Polaris 12 support as well as dozens of performance improvements. The Gallium 3D driver received numerous fixes and updates also. The Mesa core is receiving lots of work regarding the GLSL Shader Cache.

Also noteworthy is the arrival of etnaviv, the Gallium3D community-written, open source driver for Vivante GPU IP.

“Mesa 17.0 presents a major jump in more than just the version number. It is the first release to feature a render-only GPU driver” says Emil Velikov, Mesa release manager.

This is indeed an exciting upgrade that will be particularly appreciated by gamers.

Mesa 17 support will be available in the coming months on a number of Linux distributions, including Arch Linux, Debian, Fedora, OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and Ubuntu.

Interested in getting the latest release? Head on over to mesa3d.org.