14 DAY TRIAL // Mesa developer Andres Gomez is pleased to inform the Linux community about the immediate availability of the fourth maintenance update to the Mesa 17.1 3D Graphics Library for GNU/Linux distributions.
Yes, that's right, Mesa 17.1.4 is now available and it brings a bunch of performance improvements for Intel and AMD Radeon users. This seems to be the biggest update of the series so far, and includes a large number of patches for the Intel i965 OpenGL graphics driver.
These should add proper color interpolation for 3rd generation Intel processors, fix the Broxton 2x6 l3 configuration, improve compatibility with OpenGL 4.1 or later on 7th generation Intel processors, add some corrections to avoid hangings on Intel Haswell CPUs, and allow Intel Skylake CPUs get in-range clear colors.
The Intel ANV Vulkan driver was updated as well with better support for L3 cache programming on Intel Bay Trail processor. The Gallivm, Etnaviv, Nouveau, and SVGA drivers also received a handful of patches to fix various issues, and the DRI2 drivers can now properly count configs.
There are more updates to the AMD Radeon and Android drivers
For AMD Radeon users, Mesa 7.1.4 promises to several improvements to the RadeonSI graphics driver with a new Polaris12 PCI ID and a deadlock fix, as well as to the r600 graphics driver to be capable of uploading PBO textures to compressed textures. The AMD drivers can now correctly generate the sid tables.
On the other hand, the Android driver received a workaround for apps which choose their EGLConfig incorrectly. A bunch of EGL improvements are present and well in this maintenance update so check the full changelog in the release notes for more details, and Mesa 17.1.4 patches a recent build problem on Android.
From build and integration point of view, we have added a fix to solve a linking problem for systems that lack libpthread.so, we have fixed a recent build problem with Android and we have also included a missing header for EGL, GLES and VG headers that was not included when EGL building was disabled," says Andres Gomez.
Mesa 17.1.4 is coming soon to a GNU/Linux distribution near you, but you can download the source tarball from our website if you fancy compiling on your favorite operating system or you're an OS integrator. We recommend all users to update to Mesa 17.1.4 as soon as possible if they want to have a better gaming experience.