14 DAY TRIAL // The Mesa problem in Ubuntu Linux is about to be resolved very soon, after the game developers behind the UK-based Feral Interactive video game publishing company urged Canonical to update the software to the most recent version.
The Mesa 3D Graphics Library is a unique open-source implementation of the OpenGL graphics API for Linux-based operating systems, and it includes drivers for Intel, Radeon, and Nvidia graphics cards. But it looks like Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) was shipping with a pretty old version of Mesa.
"[Ubuntu] 16.04 shipped with 11.2.0 so it’s a slightly bigger update there, while yakkety is already on 12.0.3 but the new version should give radeon users a 15% performance boost in certain games with complex shaders," explained Timo Aaltonen, Hardware Enablement, Field Expert Squad Team Lead at Canonical Ltd.
Mesa 12.0.4 is coming soon to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and Ubuntu 16.10
Therefore, the good news we'd like to share with you today is that Mesa 12.0.4 3D Graphics Library, which is currently the most advanced release of the Mesa 12.0 series, is coming soon to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) and Ubuntu 16.10, promising a 15% performance boost for AMD Radeon graphics cards.
But before it lands in the stable repos of the latest Ubuntu releases, it needs to be thoroughly tested. Therefore, users are invited by Timo Aaltonen to give Mesa 12.0.4 a spin by adding his PPA (Personal Package Archive) using the commands listed below in the Terminal app and report if it works or not with their GPU. Intel Skylake seems to work well with Mesa 12.0.4, according to the developer.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:tjaalton/test
sudo apt-get update