Mesa 10.4 RC1 Is Here, Lands Direct3D 9 State Tracker

Emil Velikov has announced the first release candidate for the upcoming Mesa 10.4 release.

Mesa 10.4 is tentatively scheduled for release on 5 December and up to that point there's weekly release candidates planned. There's been tons of features and improvements merged over the past three months to make this a very exciting release, albeit there's not yet officially any OpenGL 4 compliance -- but many scattered GL4 extensions implemented. In the coming days on Phoronix will be a feature overview and more performance benchmarks of this newest Mesa code.

The brief Mesa 10.4 RC1 announcement can be read on the Mesa-dev list.

Also worth noting is that Emil decided to pull the "Gallium Nine" code for Mesa 10.4! The code is the Direct3D 9 state tracker that where a patched copy of Wine can yield much greater Wine gaming performance compared to Wine's conventional Direct3D-to-OpenGL translation layer. This D3D9 code has been in the works for a while but as of now Wine developers don't intend to land the support on their end so to actually use this new Mesa 10.4 state tracker you'll need to patch your own copy of Wine or use an alternative build.