The New Features Of Mesa 10.3

Mesa 10.3 is gearing up for its official release in the weeks ahead and with the code having already been branched here's a rundown of the many new features.

Mesa 10.3 represents about three months of development work and is nearing completion with its OpenGL 4.0 support, but that wasn't completed in time to mark bumping the version number to Mesa 11.0. Of the Mesa 10.3 highlights include:

- Radeon H.264 video encoding support using the VCE engine on the latest AMD GPUs and implemented by the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver and the encode interface is exposed using the new OpenMAX Gallium3D state tracker.

- Good support for AMD Hawaii GPUs for those not wanting to use the high-performance Catalyst driver.

- GL 3.30 compliance for Gallium3D Softpipe.

- Maxwell Gallium3D support for the latest-generation NVIDIA GeForce 750 series hardware within the Nouveau driver.

- Nouveau support for Tegra K1 graphics / GK20A. This work was done by NVIDIA to provide support for the Kepler-based "GK20A" graphics processor in Mesa and there's also the DRM driver work contributed by NVIDIA Corp for this high-performance ARM SoC.

- Nouveau now supports AMD's GL performance monitor extension.

- Numerous Freedreno driver improvements for Qualcomm ARM SoCs on this reverse-engineered open-source driver.

- GLX DRI3 GPU offloading support.

- Continued work on Mesa Mega Drivers.

- A large number of OpenGL 4.x extensions have been implemented and other new GLSL functionality. Among the additions in Mesa 10.3 include BPTC texture compression support, ARB_copy_image, some OpenGL 4.5 components, ARB_fragment_layer_viewport, and much more.

- The new Broadcom VC4 Gallium3D driver developed by Eric Anholt. The VC4 Gallium3D driver is still a work-in-progress along with the new DRM driver, but is making good progress and supports the Raspberry Pi on a fully open-source GPU driver.

- GLX_MESA_query_renderer -- a GLX extension designed by Mesa developers and targeting game developers -- finally is working for non-Intel drivers.

- Various performance optimizations.

- There's also a new software rasterizer driver (kms_swrast_dri) that works with DRM drivers that lack a full GEM memory management implementation, like QXL or SimpleDRM.

We've already delivered many Mesa 10.3 performance tests using the Intel, Radeon, and Nouveau drivers while more benchmarks are still forthcoming. Any other Mesa 10.3 changes we missed or features you wish were added? Let us know in the forums.