Mesa 23.3 Released With Initial NVK Vulkan Driver, AMD RDNA3 Refresh & Raspberry Pi 5

Eric Engestrom with Igalia just released Mesa 23.3 as the much anticipated quarterly update to this set of open-source 3D drivers principally focused on OpenGL and Vulkan API support.

Mesa 23.3 is an exciting release in that it introduces NVK, the NVIDIA Vulkan driver that can be used with the Nouveau DRM kernel driver. For Mesa 23.3 the support is still in its early stages while Mesa 24.0-devel continues seeing near-daily commits to NVK. This NVK driver is off to a nice start for Vulkan API support in the open-source NVIDIA graphics space. You need to be on at least Linux 6.6 for proper Nouveau uAPI support and then with Linux 6.7 for RTX 20 series and newer is the NVIDIA GSP support to improve the performance somewhat, but this driver is still a long ways off from the features and performance of the proprietary NVIDIA Vulkan Linux driver.

Mesa 23.3 also adds initial GFX11.5 "RDNA3 refresh" support to the RadeonSI and RADV drivers, initial Raspberry Pi 5 support although that OpenGL and Vulkan driver support depends on the DRM kernel driver bits not landing until Linux 6.8, and then the other usual code churn. Of note is the never-ending performance optimizations and new extension work for the open-source Intel and AMD Radeon graphics drivers.

Mesa 23.3 sources can be downloaded from GitLab. With no updates to the Mesa 23.2 series in more than two months, it's great seeing Mesa 23.3 be out and take over as the new series moving ahead. Mesa 23.3 is a great release for open-source GPU drivers ahead of the holidays.