Features To Find With Mesa 11.1

Mesa 11.1 is set to be released next month and while it won't advance the OpenGL 4 state for the Intel/Radeon/Nouveau drivers, there is a lot of other changes that have built up over the past quarter to get excited about for users of this open-source Linux graphics driver stack.

Some of the highlights for Mesa 11.1 include:

- Various new OpenGL 4.x extensions are supported by core Mesa and the RadeonSI/Intel/Nouveau drivers, however, not enough to bump the OpenGL support level for Intel to OpenGL 4.x or R600g and not enough to advance the Nouveau NVC0 or RadeonSI drivers either to OpenGL 4.2.

- The new VirGL Gallium3D driver code that works with the new Linux 4.4+ DRM kernel driver and updated QEMU for allowing OpenGL accelerated support in guest VMs that's handled by then by the host's hardware/driver.

- 16x MSAA in i965 that's only for Intel Skylake and newer.

- Nouveau performance counter work with hooking up AMD_performance_monitor NV50 support, basic compute support, and more.

- OpenGL 3.1 support for the Freedreno driver with Qualcomm Adreno A3xx/A4xx hardware.

- OpenGL 3.3 for the VMware driver (VMWgfx) when also running an updated Linux kernel and using VMware Workstation 12.

- Improvements to the Clover state tracker for OpenCL.

- DCC and DCC fast clear for RadeonSI.

- Many VC4 Raspberry Pi Gallium3D driver improvements.

- VA-API HEVC video decoding in Gallium3D thanks to AMD.

- Various other R600g and RadeonSI improvements.

If I missed anything else exciting about Mesa 11.1, feel free to point it out in the forums. Stay tuned to Phoronix for more Mesa 11.1 performance benchmarks and news about Mesa 11.1. This next Mesa quarterly release is planned for release around mid-December and will have weekly release candidates until the new version is ready. Running Mesa Git (along with LLVM SVN) on Ubuntu Linux installations is easy via the Padoka PPA for those interested in helping test the latest development code.