Mesa 22.3 Released With RDNA3 Vulkan, Rusticl OpenCL, Better Intel Arc Graphics

Mesa 22.3 is now officially available as the newest quarterly feature release for this set of open-source user-space graphics driver components.

Arguably most notable with Mesa 22.3 is that the RDNA3 "GFX11" AMD Radeon graphics support is hopefully in good shape for the Radeon RX 7000 series. Mesa 22.3 has initial RADV Vulkan driver support for RDNA3/GFX11, building off the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver support worked on by AMD. But the RADV work continues to be led by Red Hat, Valve, and other external developers. We'll see in a few weeks how well this Radeon RX 7000 series support works in practice or if early Radeon RX 7900 series users will want to be riding Mesa Git.

Also exciting with Mesa 22.3 is that the Vulkan ray-tracing (RT) support is much more mature and faster than prior releases. RADV ray-tracing is becoming usable finally for Radeon graphics card owners using this Mesa driver. There has also been related work like RADV supporting the Radeon Raytracing Analyzer.

With Mesa 22.3, RadeonSI has also enabled OpenGL threading by default to yield better performance. Up to this point for years RadeonSI OpenGL threading relied upon per-game white-listing while finally it's being enabled universally.

Another significant step forward with Mesa 22.3 is the introduction of Rusticl as a Rust-written OpenCL implementation for Gallium3D. Rusticl has come together extremely well the past few months and is working with more Gallium3D drivers and even Zink for running atop Vulkan drivers. Rusticl provides OpenCL 3.0 support, complete with images support. Rusticl in Mesa 22.3 is a great start and hopefully over 2023 we'll see more features, adoptions, and performance optimizations around this OpenCL implementation and the eventual removal of the older Clover code.

Mesa 22.3 also has the usual churn around new Vulkan extensions like KHR_shader_clock for Lavapipe, VK_EXT_attachment_feedback_loop_layout for RADV and Lavapipe, KHR_global_priority for RADV, EXT_mutable_descriptor_type for RADV, EXT_extended_dynamic_state3 for RADV and ANV, and various other new extensions.

On the Intel side one important addition is Vulkan mesh shader (VK_EXT_mesh_shader) now being supported for the Intel ANV code on DG2/Alchemist discrete graphics cards. Mesa 22.3 has also seen other continued optimizations and maturing of the DG2/Alchemist code for Arc Graphics.

For those using Freedreno as the open-source Qualcomm Adreno graphics driver for OpenGL, the OpenGL 4.5 specification is now supported up from the prior OpenGL 3.3 advertisement. The Turnip Mesa driver providing Vulkan support for Qualcomm Adreno hardware has reached Vulkan 1.3 compliance. Meanwhile for those using Zink as the generic OpenGL implementation atop Vulkan, that has continued maturing nicely and with this quarterly release has seen a lot more performance optimizations.

There is a new single-file "Mesa DB" cache type to help with dealing with shader caches. Meanwhile the Panfrost Gallium3D driver has also added shader disk cache support.

Microsoft has also been contributing a lot still for their Direct3D 12 back-end and benefiting their Windows / WSL use-cases. Mesa 22.3 has some VA-API improvements on the Microsoft side and other improvements.

See my prior Mesa 22.3 articles for more information on all the changes to be found in this Q4'2022 open-source graphics driver stack update.

More information on today's Mesa 22.3 release via the release announcement.