Mesa 22.2-rc1 Released With AMD RDNA3 & Intel Alchemist Primed, Vulkan Additions

After a few week delay to allow additional features to land, feature development on Mesa 22.2 has ended with Mesa 22.2-rc1 now being available ahead of its stable release in the coming weeks.

Over the past quarter a ton of work has been merged into Mesa 22.2, especially to the Intel and AMD Radeon OpenGL/Vulkan drivers as usual but also the various smaller OpenGL/Vulkan drivers within Mesa. Microsoft also continues contributing to upstream Mesa for bettering their efforts around getting OpenGL/OpenCL/Vulkan/Video acceleration atop Direct3D 12 on Windows.

Intel and AMD Radeon graphics driver changes continue to dominate Mesa's development thanks to the upstream vendor support.

Among the many changes in Mesa 22.2, some of the most prominent items include:

- The Intel Arc Graphics DG2/Alchemist support is in better shape with the desktop PCI IDs being added and work around small BAR, compute support, and other features added. The Mesa 22.2 support can work with Linux 6.0+ upstream kernels assuming the use of the i915.force_probe= module option to enable the currently-experimental support.

- A big performance fix for the Intel DG2 Vulkan ray-tracing code to the order of a ~100x improvement.

- AMD has been working on RDNA3 / GFX11 support for Mesa 22.2, going along with all their RDNA3 work kernel side with the AMDGPU driver. However, they haven't publicly stated whether Linux 6.0 and Mesa 22.2 are expected to be enough to provide launch-day RDNA3 graphics card support on Linux or if necessary patches remain outstanding... At least in the case of the RADV work being external from AMD, that presumably will take more time until around launch or afterwards before that is in good shape -- depending whether AMD is supplying any hardware to the Valve and Red Hat Linux graphics driver developers in advance. Stay tuned.

- The old R600g driver for Radeon HD 2000 to HD 6000 series (pre-GCN) hardware has rewritten NIR support and added NIR support for pre-Evergreen GPUs.

- RadeonSI EGL context high priority support for helping Wayland compositors.

- The Radeon RADV driver has added new extensions like primitives_generated_query, shader_module_identifier, and others. RADV also continued preparations for Vulkan mesh shader support and partial support for NVIDIA's device generated commands.

- RADV has enabled ray queries by default.

- Intel's ANV driver has also added recent Vulkan extensions too like shader module identifier that is important for VKD3D-Proton.

- Improvements for Mesa on Windows such as implementing more features for the Direct3D 12 implementation supporting OpenGL/Vulkan/OpenCL and the WGL_ARB_create_context_robustness support. There is also other work on D3D12 video acceleration that landed.

- Nouveau started working on RTX 30 "Ampere" support in its OpenGL driver.

- The Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation has seen Windows support improvements with X-Plane looking to make use of it.

- The Lavapipe driver as a software Vulkan implementation has added support for new extensions like VK_EXT_robustness2 and variable pointers support.

- Initial Arm Mali Valhall OpenGL support in Panfrost to go along with the Linux 6.0 DRM kernel driver support.

- The Etnaviv Gallium3D driver for Vivante graphics IP has added async shader compilation using ARB_parallel_shader_compile.

- Continued work on the PowerVR open-source Vulkan driver that was merged earlier this year.

- Removing the old GLSL-to-TGSI path and more GLSL IR code being replaced by NIR code and drivers like Nouveau switching to NIR by default.

- Support for building Mesa with select video codecs disabled out of software patent concerns.

- VMware SVGAv3 virtual graphics device support.

- Faster Venus Vulkan driver.

Mesa 22.2-rc1 can be downloaded from FreeDesktop.org's GitLab. Weekly release candidates of Mesa 22.2 are expected until the stable release comes out around the end of August.