Mesa 20.0 Is Imminent With New Intel OpenGL Default, Intel + RADV Vulkan 1.2, OpenGL 4.6 For RadeonSI

With the release of Mesa 20.0 being imminent, here is a look at all of the new features for this first quarter update to the Mesa 3D stack for open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers.

Highlights of the soon-to-be-out Mesa 20.0 are outlined below. Mesa 20.0 will be out as soon as today / this week unless delays happen over lingering bugs.

- This is the first Mesa release where for those with Broadwell (Gen8) Intel graphics or newer the Intel Gallium3D driver is the new default for OpenGL support. This Intel Gallium3D driver is faster and in better shape than the i965 classic driver. That older OpenGL driver will stick around for supporting Haswell graphics and prior generations.

- OpenGL 4.6 support for the RadeonSI now that NIR is enabled and in turn SPIR-V support. The RadeonSI NIR support is good enough that TGSI support was already removed as their previous intermediate representation and the de facto IR of Gallium3D drivers in the past.

- The ACO back-end for RADV now supports GCN 1.0/1.1 graphics cards plus ACO has seen other work like geometry shaders handling and Navi/GFX10 Wave32 support. RADV ACO is in quite good shape these days for helping the Radeon Linux gaming experience but not yet enabled by default.

- RADV has re-enabled NGG geometry shader support.

- RadeonSI has added a live shader cache.

- Intel Jasper Lake support for Intel's Vulkan and OpenGL drivers.

- GL_EXT_direct_state_access is now supported for OpenGL compatibility contexts.

- Various new RADV extensions like VK_AMD_device_coherent_memory, VK_AMD_mixed_attachment_samples, and other extensions.

- The Intel ANV driver has also picked up a few more extensions while both RADV and ANV are now exposing Vulkan 1.2.

- Various Intel Vulkan optimizations.

- NIR linker performance improvements.

- The LLVMpipe driver has basic OpenGL support available via an environment variable.

- LLVMpipe also now uses NIR by default.

- The Raspberry Pi V3D driver now has OpenGL ES 3.2 geometry shader support and ironed out OpenGL ES 3.1.

- TURNIP Vulkan driver improvements for this open-source Qualcomm Adreno Vulkan driver.

Fresh Intel/AMD Mesa 20.0 benchmarks will be coming up on Phoronix soon.