Mesa 23.0 Feature Development Ends With Many Vulkan Additions

Mesa 23.0 feature development wrapped up today with the code having been branched from the main branch and now Mesa 23.1 entering development.

Mesa 23.0 has added support for various new Vulkan extensions over the past three months. The Radeon "RADV" driver has added VK_EXT_descriptor_buffer, VK_AMD_shader_early_and_late_framgent_tests, VK_AMD_shader_explicit_vertex_parameter for RDNA3, VK_EXT_swapchain_colorspace, and more. The Vulkan mesh shader functionality is also now enabled by default for RADV with Radeon RX 6000 series hardware on Linux 6.1+ for the gang submit support.

Also notable with Mesa 23.0 is better Vulkan ray-tracing support for RADV and many other RDNA3 performance improvements and fixes/optimizations. Particularly if you are a Radeon RX 7900 series owner, using Mesa 23.0 or newer is highly recommended compared to Mesa 22.3 stable.

Let's raise a toast to all the Mesa developers for continuing to advance the open-source Linux graphics driver stack. Mesa 23.0 is shaping up to be another great quarterly feature release.

Over on the Intel side there have been continued optimizations for DG2/Alchemist Arc Graphics and other enhancements in general. Mesa 23.0 also has more work on Zink, Microsoft's Dozen for Vulkan on D3D12 is in better shape, some fixes/attention to the HasVK driver for old Intel hardware with Vulkan, accelerated video encoding for guest VMs with Virgl, and initial support for RTX 30 "Ampere" GPUs with the Linux 6.2 kernel Nouveau support.

Mesa 23.0-rc1 should be released shortly as the first weekly release candidate while for now you can fetch the branched code on the new 23.0 branch. Mesa 23.0 stable should be out in February or March depending upon how the weekly release candidates play out and any other release management delays.