14 DAY TRIAL // After being in development for the past month or so, during which it received a total of three RC (Release Candidate) builds, the final version of the highly-anticipated Mesa 13.0.0 3D Graphics Library is now available for GNU/Linux distributions.
And it looks like it's a major release that we must install on our Linux-powered computers if we want to play games, use various OpenGL apps, or just have the best possible graphics support for our AMD Radeon, Nvidia, or Intel GPUs. The biggest new feature of Mesa 13.0.0 is, as expected, OpenGL 4.4 and OpenGL 4.5 capability.
While OpenGL 4.4/4.5 is there after upgrading to Mesa 13.0.0 stable, the drivers may show a lower version. That happens because of the pending Khronos CTS validation, but it will be fixed very soon in an upcoming point release, such as 13.0.1. The good news continues with a Radeon Vulkan driver (RADV) for supported AMD Radeon GPUs by the AMDGPU kernel driver.
OpenGL ES 3.2 now available for Intel Skylake or later
The list of cool new features implemented in today's Mesa 3D 13.0.0 Graphics Library release continues with OpenGL ES 3.2 support for Intel Skylake or later, OpenGL ES 3.1 support for Intel Haswell, Windows-DRI support to the GLX component, as well as KHR_no_config_context and EGL_KHR_debug support for EGL component.
The Mesa EGL interface also received official support for EGL_MESA_platform_surfaceless, along with various improvements for Android, X11/DRI3, and Wayland backends. H.264 encoding support is now available for the Video Acceleration API (VAAPI) and H.265 decoding support for OMX.
You should also know that Mesa 13.0.0 3D Graphics Library requires Flex 2.6.1 or older, libudev is no longer required and was replaced by libdrm, third-party tools are required for certain components, such as xxd for Intel's aubinator and python2 for SWR, and dozens of GL extensions have been added to the included drivers. Check out the full release notes for more details.