Mesa 22.1 Released With Many Vulkan Improvements, Kopper For Zink, Imagination Driver
Mesa 22.1 is an exciting update with a lot of work as usual on the Intel Graphics and AMD Radeon sides -- both for OpenGL and Vulkan from new hardware support to new extensions and other improvements. Outside of the usual Intel and AMD changes, Mesa 22.1 has a lot of work on Zink including the new Kopper component being added for enriching OpenGL implemented on top of Vulkan, Imagination has merged their PowerVR Rogue Vulkan driver while the kernel driver has yet to be upstreamed, Intel DG2/Alchemist support appears to be stable now, and a lot of work on the smaller drivers.
The Mesa 22.1 highlights include:
- Ray primitive culling for helping to improve the RADV ray-tracing support. RADV RT support is also further along for Doom Eternal and KHR_ray_query support.
- AMD GFX1036 / GFX1037 support.
- RADV added Dynamic VRS support for variable rate shading in an effort to improve power savings on the Steam Deck with this Valve-led change.
- The Imagination PowerVR Rogue GPU Vulkan driver was merged in its initial form. The Imagination DRM/KMS kernel driver is still being tackled as are other Imagination Vulkan driver features. Nice to see this finally happen albeit sad it didn't happen many years ago.
- Intel Arctic Sound M support was added -- following the same DG2/Alchemist driver code paths for this forthcoming server part. The DG2/Alchemist support for Mesa 22.1 also appears to be in good shape for forthcoming Arc Graphics discrete graphics cards.
- The Lavapipe software Vulkan driver implementation now has Vulkan 1.3 support and a host of new extensions supported, such as the recent EXT_graphics_pipeline_library and others.
- Many bug fixes for the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver implementation and the biggest milestone this cycle was the merging of Kopper.
- Many new extensions for Radeon RADV and Intel ANV Vulkan as well as smaller drivers like V3DV, Turnip, Venus, and others.
- The Direct3D 12 path for use by Windows / WSL2 now has support for OpenGL 4.2 functionality, up from OpenGL 3.3 previously.
- Dozen "dzn" was merged for Vulkan implemented on Direct3D 12 for use by Windows/WSL.
- Intel introduced a tiny OpenCL compiler that is going to be used as part of their ray-tracing implementation.
- The Raspberry Pi V3D OpenGL driver finally has an on-disk shader cache.
- Encoder Format Conversion (EFC) support for Radeon GPUs with VCN 2.0 IP.
- PanVK has seen progress on compute shader support.
- Venus VirtIO-GPU Vulkan added code for supporting ANGLE.
- The open-source Nouveau driver for old GeForce 6/7/8 GPUs switched to using NIR by default for improving its shader compilation stack via the NIR-to-TGSI code path for those still using these very old NVIDIA GPUs.
- Improved OpenGL compatibility profile support for the Intel Crocus driver.
Mesa 22.1 is quite a healthy update to this open-source user-space 3D stack while Mesa 22.2 is already well under development for release next quarter.
If you are building Mesa from source, you can grab the latest sources via Mesa3D.org and there is the brief release announcement on the mailing list.
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