Mesa 21.1 Released With RADV Variable Rate Shading, More Intel Vulkan Improvements

Mesa 21.1 is available today as the latest quarterly feature release to this collection of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers. There are many features to show with this new release and it even managed to release on-schedule.

Mesa 21.1 brings a wide assortment of improvements to the many contained open-source user-space drivers, but as usual are dominated by enhancements to the Intel and Radeon driver components, especially the Vulkan drivers given the mature state of the OpenGL drivers these days.

Some of the Mesa 21.1 enhancements include:

- RADV Variable Rate Shading for trading lower quality for faster performance.

- RADV has also seen a variety of other optimizations including for its ACO compiler back-end too.

- Radeon Aldebaran support was merged.

- Many improvements with regards to OpenGL features and performance for the OpenGL-on-Vulkan Zink code -- most notably is OpenGL 4.6 support. OpenGL ES 3.1 is also now supported too for Zink.

- The AMD code has continued seeing Smart Access Memory work.

- The Lavapipe CPU-based Vulkan driver picked up many more features, including tentative Vulkan 1.1 support.

- Conservative rasterization for the Intel ANV driver.

- Continued Intel Gen12 graphics optimizations.

- Gallium Nine updates.

- A basic shader cache for Virgl to help with performance.

- Lima also picked up a shader cache.

- R600g has OpenGL 4.5 with the NIR back-end.

- Single file Mesa shader cache support.

- Broadcom V3D optimizations too.

- DRM format modifiers support for AMD.

- Other new Vulkan extensions like VK_KHR_zero_initialize_workgroup_memory on Intel and AMD.

There is also the very brief Mesa 21.1 announcement.