Some Of The New Features Coming For Mesa 9.2

Mesa 9.2 is slated for release next month, which means its code will be branched soon, so here's a look at some of the exciting features that have been merged for this next Mesa open-source Linux graphics release.

This list isn't exhaustive and doesn't cover all of the good stuff making up Mesa 9.2 but hopefully you have been keeping up with all of the Phoronix news coverage as Mesa developments are covered almost daily. More articles covering Mesa 9.2 will continue to come in the next few weeks.

Some key features for Mesa 9.2 include:

- Much better performanc! LLVMpipe is a hell of a lot faster for software-accelerated graphics, Radeon Gallium3D is faster, Intel graphics are faster, etc. There's already been plenty of OpenGL Mesa 9.2 benchmarks but more are on the way.

- AMD Radeon HD 8000 support for the forthcoming "Sea Islands" support.

- Intel Haswell support is much better and the Intel Valley View / Bay Trail support is also in near good standing for its release in the coming months.

- Various OpenGL improvements (like GL 3.2 multi-sample textures and Gallium3D LLVM geometry shaders) particularly around hitting OpenGL 3.2~3.3 support, but it's still not complete yet.

- The AMD "RadeonSI" Gallium3D driver for the Radeon HD 7000/8000 series of graphics processors is in much better shape than found in Mesa 9.1. There's new features, better support, and all around is in much better shape though there's still much work ahead. The AMD R600 Gallium3D driver remains in much better condition than RadeonSI.

- Various OpenCL/GPGPU improvements for Gallium3D, particularly by AMD for the Radeon driver.

- FreeBSD support improvements and there's been changes for helping OpenBSD.

- The Freedreno Gallium3D driver was merged as the first open-source mainline ARM SoC Gallium3D/Mesa graphics driver.

- Many bug-fixes and other various minor improvements to these open-source OpenGL hardware drivers.