Mesa 24.1-rc1 Released With Many OpenGL & Vulkan Driver Improvements

Shortly following today's Mesa 24.1 code branching, the first release candidate has been announced by ongoing Mesa release manager Eric Engestrom.

Eric briefly announced the availability of Mesa 24.1-rc1 for those wishing to test this quarterly feature update to this set of OpenGL and Vulkan open-source drivers along with associated user-space driver code.

There will be weekly release candidates of Mesa 24.1 until the stable release is ready sometime around mid-May.

Mesa 24.1 has countless improvements to the AMD RadeonSI and RADV drivers, huge progress made on the open-source NVK Vulkan driver for NVIDIA GPUs, and a lot of ongoing optimization work with the Intel ANV driver as well as preparations for Xe2 graphics with Lunar Lake and Battlemage. Intel Arrow Lake graphics support is also good to go with Mesa 24.1. Mesa 24.1 also carries support for upcoming Radeon graphics IP, explicit sync support for Vulkan drivers, much better Asahi AGX Gallium3D driver support to the point of having OpenGL 4.6 capabilities, new Arm Mali GPU support within the Panfrost driver, continued Microsoft D3D12 driver enhancements, and more. I'll have up my usual Mesa feature write-up for the interesting 24.1 changes soon. As well, new Mesa 24.1 benchmarks to come on Phoronix.

Overall this is quite a feature-packed release with Mesa 24.1 that will be very impactful for AMD Radoen and Intel graphics Linux enthusiasts/gamers especially but also notably this cycle for NVIDIA NVK and Apple/Asahi AGX too.