Mesa 21.3 Released With Radeon RADV Ray-Tracing, Much Better Zink

Mesa 21.3 is now out as the latest quarterly feature release to this collection of open-source graphics drivers.

Mesa 21.3 as the Q4'2021 update brings a number of exciting improvements and new features like:

- Radeon RADV ray-tracing support landed along with experimental shader-based ray-tracing for older Radeon GPUs. Note though that this RADV ray-tracing code hasn't yet been well optimized and the performance is likely to be slow and there may still be various game issues. In any case, at least it's finally maturing now in mainline in experimental form.

- RADV now enables NGG culling (NGGC) by default for RDNA2 GPUs. With Mesa 21.2 this was an opt-in feature for helping the performance in some areas but is now enabled by default.

- Threaded shader compilation support for the Intel "Iris" Gallium,3D driver.

- VA-API support for AV1 video content for use with the open-source AMD graphics driver stack so far when using RDNA2 GPUs.

- OpenGL ES 3.2 is exposed for Zink. There is also many performance improvements and expanded game support for this OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation.

- Numerous new Vulkan extensions are supported by Radeon RADV and Intel ANV.

- The Lavapipe software-based Vulkan driver has also been seeing a lot of work from new extensions to working anisotropic filtering support.

- OpenGL 4.5 compatibility context support for the LLVMpipe software driver. LLVMpipe also picked up FP16 support and other improvements, including massive speed-ups for 2D workloads.

- Panfrost Gallium3D is now conformant with OpenGL ES 3.1.

- Various OpenGL and Vulkan extensions wired up to the different drivers plus many fixes throughout.

The Mesa 21.3.0 release announcement can be found on the mailing list.