Mesa 23.3-rc1 Available For Testing With NVIDIA Vulkan Driver, Raspberry Pi 5 Support

Shortly after today's Mesa 23.3 branching and opening Mesa 24.0-devel on Git main, Mesa 23.3-rc1 is now formally available as the first weekly release candidate for this quarter's feature series.

Mesa 23.3 brings many exciting open-source OpenGL and Vulkan driver new extensions, features, expanded hardware support, and other improvements. Most notably it merged the NVK Vulkan driver as the experimental open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver that can work on Linux 6.6+ and is the very first open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver. But don't expect great performance yet -- the NAK Rust-written shader compiler is still in the works and the NVIDIA GSP firmware support has yet to be queued for the mainline Nouveau DRM kernel driver... The GSP firmware support and re-clocking didn't make it into DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.7 merge window, so it won't be until into 2024 before potentially having somewhat "okay" NVIDIA open-source graphics performance with Nouveau/NVK.

Initial Benchmarks Of The "NVK" Open-Source NVIDIA Vulkan Driver

As outlined in today's Mesa 24.0-devel article, Mesa 23.3 also delivers on countless RADV Vulkan driver improvements, initial AMD GFX11.5 / RDNA3 Refresh support, initial Raspberry Pi 5 OpenGL and Vulkan support (when running a supported kernel), various Intel Arc Graphics optimizations have continued, more efficient MSAA with AMD RDNA3 GPUs, initial Intel ANV Vulkan driver sparse support, mesh shader support by default for the Intel ANV driver, and the open-source NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver has merged this cycle for that preliminary support. Other Mesa components like Rusticl and Zink along with smaller hardware drivers like the Asahi Gallium3D code have also seen a lot of nice improvements for Mesa 23.3.

Mesa 23.3-rc1 is now available for testing. Release manager Eric Engestrom aims for weekly release candidates until the Mesa 23.3 release is officially declared -- likely sometime in November.