Mesa 18.0 Now Under Feature Freeze With 18.0-RC1 Premiere

Feature development on Mesa 18.0 has now ended with the release today of 18.0-RC1 following the code-base being branched.

Emil Velikov of Collabora just announced the availability of Mesa 18.0-RC1. As usual, he's planning on weekly release candidates until the 18.0.0 stable release is ready to ship. Velikov tentatively expects to ship Mesa 18.0.0 around 9 February, but as we know from past releases, it might end up slipping by some days.

The brief Mesa 18.0-RC1 release announcement can be read on Mesa-dev.

Coming up shortly I'll have Mesa 17.3 vs. 18.0-RC comparison benchmarks as well as our usual Mesa 18.0 feature overview for the changes that built up over the past quarter, etc. Overall, Mesa 18.0 will be another hearty release with many Vulkan and OpenGL driver improvements as the ANV/RADV drivers become quite mature and back on the GL front they are nearly at OpenGL 4.6 support but did not achieve it this cycle due to the SPIR-V ingestion support still settling. There are also performance optimizations in the drivers too.

Mesa Git meanwhile is now tracking Mesa 18.1 development for release next quarter.