Mesa 22.0-rc1 Released With Many Radeon & Intel Linux GPU Driver Features, Vulkan 1.3

After a three week delay to the Mesa 22.0 schedule to allow Vulkan 1.3 to land among other last minute features, the code was branched today that marks the end of feature development on this quarterly Mesa3D driver stack. Mesa 22.0 stable should be out in a few weeks time and with it comes many new features to this collection of open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers predominantly used on Linux systems but of growing use on Windows with the D3D12 driver and other platforms.

As usual, the AMD Radeon and Intel graphics drivers have seen the most activity with Mesa 22.0 with Vulkan 1.3 support and other new extensions, continued work on their OpenGL drivers, more performance optimizations, and other improvements. But Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan continues seeing a lot of work, Mesa continues working on its OpenGL/OpenCL-on-D3D12 code path, and the smaller drivers have seen refinements.

For my quick summary tonight of Mesa 22.0 highlights, the big changes 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.

I'll have a more thorough feature list by the time Mesa 22.0 is ready to ship around early to mid March. Mesa 22.0 will continue seeing weekly release candidates until that stable release is ready. Stay tuned to Phoronix for more Mesa 22.0 benchmarks while the brief 22.0-rc1 announcement can be read on the Mesa mailing list.