Mesa 22.1-rc1 Brings Radeon Vulkan Enhancements, Imagination Driver & Microsoft Dozen

Following yesterday's Mesa 22.1 code branching / feature freeze, Mesa 22.1-rc1 was released this afternoon as the first step towards releasing Mesa 22.1 next month. Mesa 22.1 is bringing improvements for old NVIDIA graphics on open-source, many Radeon "RADV" Vulkan enhancements, a lot of work as always on the Intel side, the new Imagination Rogue PowerVR driver, and much more.

Mesa 22.1 will proceed to see weekly release candidates until the official release is ready sometime in May. Among the highlights for this quarterly feature update to this collection of open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers predominantly used on Linux are:

- 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 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.

The brief Mesa 22.1-rc1 release announcement can be read on the Mesa mailing list.