Mesa 21.1 Squeezes In Improvements For Direct3D 9 (Gallium Nine)

Written by Michael Larabel in Mesa on 14 April 2021 at 06:18 AM EDT. 4 Comments
MESA
The feature freeze and code branching for Mesa 21.1 is imminent but last minute feature work continues to pour in. Hitting Mesa Git this morning as the latest activity were some fixes and improvements in Gallium Nine for providing Direct3D 9 support atop Gallium3D drivers to Wine/Windows programs.

Gallium Nine lead developer Axel Davy saw his various fixes and improvements to this state tracker merged in time for Mesa 21.1. There are various fixes made as a result of running the Address Sanitizer over the code as well as from test compiles using LLVM's Clang. There are also various game fixes included as part of this broad merge request too. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is one of the games that should be working again with Gallium Nine.

Rounding out this broad Gallium Nine update are also virtual memory reduction patches and changing of various default configuration knobs as well as adding some new ones. New options for Gallium Nine include the ability to force Gallium Nine to use the CPU / LLVMpipe for the REF rendering device and process vertices call. There is also an option to override the reported virtual memory size as some older Windows games don't support more than 2GB of vRAM or have other oddities in their vRAM handling.

Meanwhile Gallium Nine in Mesa 21.1 is enabling tear-free discard support by default, thread submit is now turned on, and the texture memory limit default is now set to 128MB.

For those using Gallium Nine for running Direct3D 9 on Linux rather than the likes of DXVK or Wine's Direct3D OpenGL back-end, the latest patches that made it for Mesa 21.1 can be found via this merge request.

If all goes well Mesa 21.1 stable will be out in May.
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