Mesa 20.3 Released With Big Improvements For Open-Source Graphics Drivers

Mesa 20.3 has been released as the Q4'2020 open-source graphics driver update, primarily around providing OpenGL and Vulkan support on the likes of Intel and AMD Radeon graphics along with the reverse-engineered Nouveau support, many smaller drivers especially in the embedded space, and the growing list of CPU-based implementations and other translation efforts.

Mesa 20.3 as usual sees much of the exciting work for the Intel and AMD Radeon graphics driver work -- including new hardware support -- but this quarter there has also been a lot of core work, the Raspberry Pi Vulkan driver added, OpenCL compute improvements, ongoing work around the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan Gallium3D code, and much more. Among the changes to enjoy with Mesa 20.3 include:

- The V3DV Vulkan driver was merged for providing Raspberry Pi 4 Vulkan support.

- Initial support for Intel Gen12 Alder Lake graphics.

- Initial AMD Dimgrey Cavefish and VanGogh graphics support for those upcoming parts.

- Lavapipe was merged (formerly named VALLIUM) as a Vulkan CPU-based implementation similar to what LLVMpipe is for OpenGL.

- Compute kernel support within the Intel Iris Gallium3D driver.

- Nouveau NVC0 on-disk shader cache support.

- Etnaviv also added on-disk shader cache support.

- Support for faking less video memory albeit primarily for debugging/testing purposes.

- More Intel Gen12 / Tiger Lake graphics performance optimizations.

- Vulkan transform feedback was added for Intel Haswell.

- Intel Gen10 / Cannonlake graphics code was finally killed.

- OpenCL 1.2 support for Gallium3D's Clover along with a lot of other compute-related work. There is also OpenCL image support for Nouveau.

- NGG geometry shader support within RADV's ACO compiler code

- OpenGL 3.3 for Zink along with other Zink improvements for OpenGL on Vulkan while more GL4 and performance work is still being upstreamed.

- NIR to TGSI support was added.

- Rewritten AMD Zen L3 cache optimization.

- RadeonSI EGL protected content support.

- Various new OpenGL and Vulkan extensions supported.

Mesa 20.3.0 is now released. Mesa 21.0 is now in development and that should see its stable release in March.