Mesa 10.2 Features Are Quite Exciting

Mesa 10.2 is expected to be released in the next few days and with this three-month update will come many improvements to the Intel, Radeon, and Nouveau graphics drivers plus other improvements to core Mesa/Gallium3D, the advancement of the Freedreno Gallium3D driver, and much more.

Among the highlights for the Mesa 10.2 release are:

- Many Freedreno Gallium3D improvements, the open-source reverse-engineered driver for the Qualcomm Adreno SoCs. Among the improvements are XA 2D acceleration support and hooking up a ton of other functionality. While proposed as a pull request by Rob Clark for landing into the 10.2 branch, within Git master is now OpenGL 2.0 support and even OpenGL 2.1.

- The OpenMAX state tracker is available and the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver changes support "VCE" video encoding for the very latest Radeon GPUs when also using a supported (Linux 3.15+) kernel.

- Many Intel Broadwell support improvements for the CPUs that will begin to surface before the end of the year... There's now HiZ support, MSAA anti-aliasing, and numerous other features.

- Initial support for upcoming Intel Cherryview hardware.

- LLVMpipe is finally living in an OpenGL 3.x world.

- AMD Mullins APUs are now supported by the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.

- GLX_MESA_query_renderer improvements as the GLX extension designed to help Linux game developers. On a faintly-related note, there's now GL_INTEL_performance_query support but only for the Intel driver at this time.

- Intel compute shader support.

- Many RadeonSI Gallium3D driver improvements, such as fast color clears, etc.

- Nouveau gained more GL functionality particularly for the "NV50" and "NVC0" drivers.

- Support for more OpenGL 4.x extensions (even some OpenGL 4.4 extensions) but Mesa 10.2 doesn't have full OpenGL 4.0 compliance. Among the newly-supported extensions are GL_ARB_buffer_storage, GL_ARB_multi_bind, GL_ARB_separate_shader_objects / GL_EXT_separate_shader_objects, GL_ARB_texture_gather in Gallium3D, GL_ARB_texture_view, etc.

Of course, at Phoronix we have already run many performance tests of the Intel / Radeon / Nouveau drivers and much more in our dozens of Mesa 10.2 articles. Coming up next week to celebrate the ten-year anniversary of Phoronix is also going to be a 50+ way Linux graphics card comparison using the Mesa/Gallium3D drivers.