14 DAY TRIAL // Today is a great day for Linux gamers as Collabora's Emil Velikov proudly announced the general availability of the Mesa 17.0.0 3D Graphics Library for all GNU/Linux operating systems.
Yes, Mesa 17, not Mesa 14, nor 15 or 16, as the development team has decided to skip them all and jump from the Mesa 13 series straight to version 17 according to a newly adopted versioning scheme based on the current year, something that will happen at the beginning of each new year.
"As some of you have noticed we've skipped the 14-16 releases altogether. Since Mesa has reached OpenGL 4.5 capability, as of Mesa 13.0.0, we decided to make a small change in versioning scheme: Previously the major number was bumped as we reach the next GL version. Now it is bumped to reflect the year," said Emil Velikov.
Intel Haswell GPUs now support OpenGL 4.5, RADV supports multiple devices
Prominent new features of Mesa 17.0.0 include OpenGL 4.5 support for Intel Haswell GPUs, support for multiple devices with the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver, the Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver now supports tessellation shader and Float64, Freedreno driver supports a5xx, and Nvidia Maxwell cards now support OpenGL 4.3.
The r600/RadeonSI drivers also received a bunch of performance improvements, and they can now handle H.264/MPEG-4 AVC Level 5.2 encoding and provide Polaris12 support. VDPAU (Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix) now uses DRI3 to directly send the buffer to the X server.
Mesa 17.0.0 3D Graphics Library also comes with a new driver for Vivante GPU IP, and it looks like some memory leaks have been resolved for the Gallium driver. Last but not least, RADV now supports the VK_AMD_draw_indirect_count and VK_AMD_negative_viewport_height Vulkan extensions, and ANV supports VK_KHR_sampler_mirror_clamp_to_edge.
There are various other improvements to the build system, which may interest system integrators and OS vendors who want to ship Mesa 17 to their users. Speaking of that, for the best gaming experience, it is recommended that you update as soon as possible to the Mesa 17 branch, which is now available for download as a tar archive.