Mesa 18.0 Officially Released With Plenty Of OpenGL & Vulkan Improvements

Mesa 18.0 managed to meet its Q1'2018 release target by just a couple of days... After being delayed a month and a half, Mesa 18.0.0 is now the latest stable version of this user-space driver stack most commonly associated with its OpenGL and Vulkan implementations.

Mesa 18.0 is shipping with 3~4 months worth of driver improvements and there's a lot for desktop users and gamers from R600g seeing some surprise improvements, RadeonSI NIR getting into much better shape, 10-bit color support, countless ANV and RADV Vulkan driver enhancements, Radeon VCN video encode support, Meson build system support, initial Intel Cannonlake hardware support, and more. See the Mesa 18.0 feature overview to learn more about this big update.

The brief Mesa 18.0.0 release announcement can be read on Mesa-dev. Mesa 18.1 meanwhile is already building up towards its next quarterly release in May or June.

Mesa 18.0 will be shipping out-of-the-box in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, Fedora 28, etc, but those wanting it today on Ubuntu and not wanting to build it from source can always make use of the Padoka PPA for the bleeding-edge Git or Pkppa for the stable build that should be updated shortly for 18.0.0.