Mesa 21.1-rc1 Released With RADV Optimizations, Faster Zink, Many Other New Features

Feature development for this quarter's Mesa 21.1 release is now over with it having been branched from main and the first release candidate issued.

Taking over Mesa 21.1 release management duties is Eric Engestrom. Eric issued a brief Mesa 21.1.0-rc1 announcement. Weekly release candidates of Mesa 21.1 are expected until Mesa 21.1.0 is ready to officially ship sometime in May. It should be early to mid May but with release delays being quite common for Mesa3D we'll see how this cycle play out.

Among the many changes to get excited about with Mesa 21.1 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.

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

- The Lavapipe CPU-based Vulkan driver picked up many more features.

- 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.

More benchmarks of the Mesa 21.1 drivers will be coming up on Phoronix soon.