Mesa 23.2 Feature Development Concludes With Numerous New Vulkan Extensions

Mesa 23.2 feature development is now over with the code having been branched and the first release candidate tagged for what will be this quarter's stable release series.

Mesa 23.2 has plenty of exciting changes with RADV ray-tracing being enabled by default for all AMD RDNA2/RDNA3 graphics processors, the Rusticl OpenCL implementation is much more capable, Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan landed plenty of improvements, BLAKE3 shader hashing, some improvements to the older R300 and R600 drivers, the Asahi AGX Gallium3D driver now supports OpenCL 3.1 and OpenGL ES 3.0, Lavapipe added task/mesh shader support along with other new features, Intel Vulkan H.265 video decoding support, Intel's Vulkan driver has enabled GPL support by default, and there are various performance optimizations within the key drivers.

Mesa 23.2 also has enabled support for various routine Vulkan extensions introduced like VK_EXT_dynamic_rendering_unused_attachments and VK_EXT_attachment_feedback_loop_dynamic_state on RADV along with VK_EXT_depth_bias_control and VK_EXT_pipeline_robustness and other extensions to help Linux gamers.

There is now the 23.2 branch and Mesa 23.2-rc1 tagged. Weekly-ish release candidates will continue until the stable Mesa 23.2 release is ready likely in August but there is the potential it could be delayed as well into September.

Mesa 23.2 in turn should find its way to autumn Linux distribution releases like Ubuntu 23.10.