Mesa 22.0 Released With Vulkan 1.3, Many Open-Source Intel & AMD Driver Improvements

Mesa 22.0 is out today as the quarterly feature update to this collection of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan graphics drivers used widely by Linux systems.

As usual, most of the open-source 3D GPU driver activity is around the Intel and AMD Radeon graphics drivers -- Intel's Iris Gallium3D, the recently introduced Intel Crocus Gallium3D driver, Intel ANV Vulkan, RadeonSI Gallium3D, and Radeon RADV drivers. But there is also healthy work going on to the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation, Freedreno, Panfrost, and the various other smaller drivers. Sadly, not much to report on the Nouveau open-source NVIDIA driver front.

The open-source Intel and AMD Radeon Linux graphics drivers in particular are in incredibly great shape and continue to dominate the Mesa3D releases for improving Linux gaming and other areas.

Some of the Mesa 22.0 highlights include:

- Vulkan 1.3 is in place for both Radeon "RADV" and Intel "ANV" Vulkan drivers. Various extensions required by Vulkan 1.3 were added earlier this cycle, including dynamic rendering (KHR_dynamic_rendering) and other features.

- Intel Alder Lake N support is in place along with starting Raptor Lake. There is also new but disabled DG2/Alchemist code.

- Adaptive-Sync/VRR for the Intel OpenGL and Vulkan drivers.

- Experimental mesh shaders for RADV and Intel ANV with DG2/Alchemist.

- Continued work on RADV ray-tracing.

- Better Radeon VCE video encode performance.

- RadeonSI sparse texture support.

- Emulated ETC2 support for RADV.

- RadeonSI NGG shader culling for Navi 1x consumer GPUs.

- Retiring of Mesa's classic drivers. As well, Intel's OpenSWR driver has moved to Mesa's "Amber" branch.

- RadeonSI and Zink now support the OpenGL ARB_sparse_texture extension.

- Microsoft's D3D12 code now supports OpenGL ES 3.1 and other features in working towards GL 4.x support too like compute shaders.

- VMware SVGA OpenGL 4.3 support when using the Linux 5.17+ and upcoming VMware virtualization software.

- The Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan code continues becoming more performant and better supporting various OpenGL features.

- Raspberry Pi V3DV Vulkan driver now works on Android.

- Freedreno has basic support for Clover OpenCL.

- DMA-BUF Feedback support within Mesa's EGL code.

- Various performance optimizations, including more RadeonSI optimizations.

Mesa 22.1 has already been in feature development for a number of weeks now in what will be the Q2'2022 open-source 3D driver stack update.

Downloads and more details on Mesa 22.0 via today's brief release announcement.