14 DAY TRIAL // The team behind the Mesa 3D Graphics Library project announced today the final release and general availability of the long-anticipated Mesa 19.0 graphics stack series for Linux-based operating systems.
Implementing the OpenGL 4.5 API, the Mesa 19.0 graphics stack is finally here after an extended development cycle that took place over the last three months. It brings dozens of new features, new extensions, and countless bug fixes. Highlights of this major new series includes support for AMD Radeon Vega 10, Vega 20, and Vega M GPUs, GNU Hurd support, and LLVM 7 compatibility.
"I'm pleased to announce the general availability of mesa 19.0.0. We've had a slightly long rc process with 7 RCs (there should have been 6, but there was a bug in the script for pulling patches resulting in two back to back RCs)," said Dylan Baker in today's announcement. "In general this release has shaped up rather nicely, and I look forward to the stable release cycle."
New OpenGL and Vulkan extensions on Mesa 19.0
The Mesa 19.0 graphics stack also comes with numerous new extensions for both OpenGL and Vulkan technologies. For OpenGL, we can mention GL_AMD_texture_texture4 for all OpenGL 4.0 drivers, shader-based software implementations of GL_ARB_vertex_attrib_64bit, GL_ARB_shader_ballot, GL_ARB_gpu_shader_fp64, and GL_ARB_gpu_shader_int64 for the i965 driver, as well as the GL_NV_shader_atomic_float extension for the nvc0 driver supporting only Fermi/Kepler.
There's several new ES extensions added in Mesa 19.0, namely GL_EXT_shader_implicit_conversions for all drivers, GL_EXT_texture_compression_bptc for all OpenGL 4.0 drivers, GL_EXT_texture_compression_rgtc for all OpenGL 3.0 drivers, GL_EXT_texture_view and GL_OES_texture_view for drivers supporting texture views, and GL_EXT_render_snorm for Gallium drivers.
For Vulkan, Mesa 19.0 adds the VK_ANDROID_external_memory_android_hardware_buffer, VK_KHR_depth_stencil_resolve, VK_KHR_draw_indirect_count, VK_EXT_conditional_rendering, and VK_EXT_scalar_block_layout extensions for Intel GPUs, as well as the VK_EXT_memory_budget and VK_EXT_scalar_block_layout for AMD Radeon GPUs, and fixes and re-exposed VK_EXT_pci_bus_info extension for both the Intel ANV and Radeon RADV Vulkan drivers.
Of course, there are numerous bug fixes and other smaller changes included in the Mesa 19.0 graphics stack series, so we recommend studying the full changelog if you're curious to know what exactly is fixed or added in this major release. Meanwhile, you can download the Mesa 19.0.0 sources right now from our free software portal if you want to compile it for your GNU/Linux distribution, though it is recommended you wait until Mesa 19.0.1 point release is out.