Introduces OpenGL 3.1 support with ARB_compatibility

May 21, 2018 14:55 GMT  ·  By

The development team behind the open-source Mesa graphics stack announced over the weekend the general availability of the final Mesa 18.1 release for Linux-based operating systems.

The Mesa 18.1 series comes approximately two months after the 18.0 branch, which probably most GNU/Linux distributions are using these days, and which already received its fourth maintenance updates. Mesa 18.1 introduces a few new features across all supported graphics drivers, but it's mostly another stability update.

Prominent new features implemented in the Mesa 18.1 graphics stack include OpenGL 3.1 support with ARB_compatibility for the nv50, nvc0, r600, RadeonSI, Gallium3D Softpipe, Gallium3D LLVMpipe, and Gallium3D SVGA graphics drivers, and enablement of disk shader cache support for the Intel i965 OpenGL graphics driver by default.

RadeonSI and Intel i965 drivers get support for new OpenGL extensions

Also for the the Intel i965 OpenGL driver, the Mesa 18.1 graphics stack series introduces support for the GL_EXT_shader_framebuffer_fetch OpenGL extension on desktops, as well as support for the GL_EXT_shader_framebuffer_fetch_non_coherent OpenGL extension.

On the other hand, the RadeonSI graphics driver for AMD Radeon GPUs received support for the GL_EXT_semaphore, GL_EXT_semaphore_fd, and GL_KHR_blend_equation_advanced OpenGL extensions. Also, Mesa 18.1 adds support for the GL_ARB_bindless_texture and GL_ARB_transform_feedback_overflow_query OpenGL extensions to the nvc0 graphics driver for Nvidia GPUs.

Of course, these are some of the most notable changes included in Mesa 18.1, which brings lots of bug fixes to improve the overall stability and reliability of the open source graphics stack. With that in mind, Mesa 18.1 is now the most advanced series of the graphics stack for Linux-based operating systems.

Most probably, most GNU/Linux distributions will soon start adopting the Mesa 18.1 graphics stack, but if you want to install it right now, you can always download the latest source tarball and compile it yourself. We recommend upgrading to the Mesa 18.1 series as soon as possible for the best gaming/3D application experience.