Mesa 24.1 Now Builds Zink By Default, Also Building D3D12 Driver By Default On Windows

As a follow-up to the news of Mesa looking at enabling Zink by default as part of the drivers to build out-of-the-box, that change has now been merged. Additionally, the D3D12 Mesa driver that sees regular contributions by Microsoft engineers is also now being compiled by default when running on Windows.

Joshua Ashton of Valve's Linux graphics team has seen his change merged to enable building Zink as part of the default set of Gallium3D drivers. Zink is being built by default considering it's becoming increasingly used for having OpenGL atop Vulkan rather than always relying on native hardware OpenGL drivers.

The Nouveau developers moving forward are looking at using Zink by default atop the NVK Vulkan driver in place of the NVC0 Gallium3D driver on NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20 "Turing" GPUs and newer. Plus the Qualcomm Adreno 700 series with Mesa only have OpenGL support via Zink and not Freedreno Gallium3D driver. The Imagination PowerVR Rogue support is much the same as well with only working on a hardware Vulkan driver while leaving OpenGL to Zink. As time passes on, more hardware will likely go the Zink route to focus just on Vulkan driver enablement.

The other merge overnight to Mesa 24.1-devel is now enabling the D3D12 Gallium3D driver by default on Windows. Joshua Ashton also authored that change and summed it up simply as:

"This is pretty much the only usable one that isn't swrast for some people, eg. WoA + QCom."

With Windows on Arm devices where only D3D12 drivers are commonly available, at least this can get OpenGL support and more at play.

Mesa 24.1 will be out next quarter with these changes and plenty more improvements to this open-source Linux graphics driver collection.