14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical's Timo Aaltonen informs users of the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) and Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) operating systems that they can now install the latest Mesa 17.1.0 3D Graphics Stack from the X-Updates PPA repository.
The Mesa 17.1.0 3D Graphics Library was officially released last week with OpenGL 4.2 support for Intel Ivy Bridge GPUs, bringing the Intel i965 OpenGL driver on par with its Android, macOS, and Windows counterparts, as well as shader on-disk cache, and Khronos Vulkan CTS compliance for the Radeon RADV Vulkan driver.
It usually takes a while until it lands in the stable software repositories of a supported Ubuntu release, as it is usually only implemented in the current development version, Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) in this case, but Canonical readied the Mesa 17.1.0 packages in their X-Updates PPA for Ubuntu 17.04 and 16.04 LTS users.
"The X-Updates PPA has the latest Mesa release for xenial and zesty, go grab it while it’s hot! On a related note, Mesa 17.0.6 got accepted to zesty-proposed, so give that a spin too if you’re running zesty and report 'yay!'/'eww..' on the SRU bug," said Timo Aaltonen in the blog announcement.
Here's how to install Mesa 17.1.0 on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and Ubuntu 17.04
Hardcore Ubuntu gamers who want to experience the best gaming performance with their AMD Radeon or Intel graphics cards should install the Mesa 17.1.0 update, which also adds an extra layer of performance to many of Feral Interactive's games for GNU/Linux distributions.
To install Mesa 17.1.0 on your Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) or Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) systems, open the Terminal app and copy/paste the following commands, one by one, hitting the Enter key after each one. Once all packages were downloaded and installed, make sure that you reboot your computer.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-x-swat/updates -y
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
In the meantime, it looks like the recently released Mesa 17.0.6 graphics stack is already in the proposed repository of the Ubuntu 17.04 operating system, so it should be promoted to the stable channels in the coming days in case you don't want to install the Mesa 17.1.0 3D Graphics Library from the X-Updates PPA.