14 DAY TRIAL // Collabora's Emil Velikov just announced a few moments ago the official availability of Mesa 17.1 as the latest stable and most advanced branch of the open-source graphics stack used by default in numerous Linux-based operating systems.
Mesa 17.1 is a massive update that introduces numerous improvements for almost all supported open source graphics drivers, including Intel i965, RadeonSI, as well as RADV and ANV Vulkan drivers.
Prominent changes include OpenGL 4.2 support for Intel Ivy Bridge GPUs in the Intel i965 OpenGL driver, which is now on par with its Android, macOS, and Windows counterparts, if not even better.
The Radeon RADV Vulkan driver received various improvements to pass the Khronos Vulkan CTS (Conformance Test Suite), and shader on-disk cache was implemented to improve the startup and shader compilation times in many games.
Mesa 17.1 adds major performance improvements for Feral Interactive's games
Another interesting change that Linux gamers will be happy to learn about is that Mesa 17.1 adds an extra layer of performance improvements for numerous of the games ported by UK-based video games publisher Feral Interactive.
"To thank contributors who had had at least 25 commits to Mesa in the past five years, Feral Interactive are offering special Steam Keys granting free access to their entire Linux repertoire," said Emil Velikov, Software Release Engineer at Collabora.
The entire list of improvements that landed for each of the supported graphics drivers shipped with the Mesa 17.1 3D Graphics Library update is attached below if you're curious to know what exactly is new, changed, or fixed.
While you can download the Mesa 17.1.0 source tarball right now and compile it on your operating system, you'll have to wait a few days or even weeks for the new Mesa stable branch to land in the repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distro.