Timothy Arceri of Valve's open-source Linux graphics driver team has landed patches in Mesa 19.0 that drastically reduce the amount of system memory used when firing up the Team Fortress 2 game.

With the Mesa 18.2.8 release at the end of December being the last release of that driver series, users should really consider upgrading to Mesa 18.3. Fortunately, Mesa 18.3.2 is out this morning with dozens of fixes.

Last month was a proposed patch that would have killed the Autotools build system within Mesa. Developers have decided for the upcoming Mesa 19.0 release not to eliminate this GNU Autotools support but rather to mark it as deprecated and require an extra flag in order to make use of it.

Lead VC4/V3D driver developer Eric Anholt of Broadcom has landed a batch of improvements to the next-generation V3D driver in Mesa 19.0.

It's been more than a month since the debut of Mesa 18.3 and the emergency 18.3.1 release while due the holidays and the release manager being sick, the next point release fell off the tracks. Mesa 18.3.2 is now being crafted and should be out in the next few days. Given the time since the previous release, Mesa 18.3.2 is heavy on fixes.

With Mesa 19.0 entering its feature freeze this week, the race is on for developers to land their last minute additions to this next quarterly installment of Mesa. Valve developer Samuel Pitoiset has landed support in the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver for the new memory budget extension.

With just days to go until the Mesa 19.0 branching and feature freeze, it's a busy time on Mesa Git with developers working to land their latest changes into this next quarterly feature release.

For those with older graphics processors, rejoice as with the upcoming Mesa 19.0 driver release it might now be possible to have OpenGL 4.0 thanks to software-based implementations of ARB_gpu_shader_int64 and ARB_gpu_shader_fp64 finally being merged to mainline. The FP64 one is most notable with that being a requirement for OpenGL 4.0 but some older GPUs lacking that capability for bumping past OpenGL 3.3.

One of the major open-source GPU compute driver initiatives going the past year has been the Red Hat folks working on adding Nouveau SPIR-V support as part of allowing GPU compute to work for this open-source NVIDIA driver. By longtime Nouveau contributor Pierre Moreau has also been work on adding SPIR-V support to Clover, the Gallium3D OpenCL state tracker.

With Mesa3D having a nice release rhythm going on now for their quarterly, time-based release cycles, all of their planned major release dates for the year are now published.

Open-source driver developer Tomeu Vizoso of Collabora has taken to some Panfrost driver work for greatly enhancing the viability of this open-source, reverse-engineered ARM Mali Linux graphics driver.

At least until D3D9-over-Vulkan is in better shape, the means by which you can achieve the greatest Direct3D 9 performance right now under Wine/Linux is by using Gallium3D's "Nine" state tracker. Unfortunately though upstream Wine developers have been reluctant to support it upstream since its limited to just Linux and of that just Gallium3D drivers, but Gallium-Nine-Standalone makes this support easier to deploy across Wine versions.

Mesa 18.2.8 was released today as what is the final planned point release for the Mesa 18.2 series. In order to continue receiving OpenGL/Vulkan open-source driver updates, users are encouraged to transition to Mesa 18.3.

Mesa had another wild year with countless improvements to the multiple vendor OpenGL/Vulkan drivers, continued improvements by Valve and other companies to make these drivers better for Linux gaming, the Meson build system support took shape, new Intel and AMD Radeon graphics support was punctually added, and many other milestones achieved.

Mesa 18.2.8 is expected to be released before the week is through as what will likely be the final point release for the 18.2 series now that Mesa 18.3 is stable.

In the event you need to deal with software S3TC decoding rather than on the GPU in cases of hardware limitations or running within a VM, Mesa this week picked up a faster implementation.

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's open-source Linux graphics driver team has posted a set of patches implementing support for shaderStorageImageMultisample. These patches are based upon work started months earlier by David Airlie and important for DXVK and for other Vulkan use-cases.

Should you still be utilizing Qualcomm Adreno 200 series graphics hardware, the open-source graphics driver support is getting better for this hardware that was Adreno's first offering a programmable pipeline and clock speeds up to 133MHz.

Given the proposed Libre RISC-V SoC that could function as a Vulkan accelerator by running the Kazan Vulkan implementation on it, I decided to have a fresh look at how the LLVMpipe performance is for running OpenGL on the CPU. Here are those tests done on a dual socket AMD EPYC server.

For those not yet prepared to move over to the Mesa 18.3 series, Mesa 18.2.7 is out today with the latest batch of fixes.

Samuel Pitoiset of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has landed some fresh patches in Mesa 19.0 (and also marked for back-porting to the stable branch) to help out the DXVK gaming experience for Windows games using Direct3D 11 that are re-mapped to run on top of the Vulkan graphics API.

Mesa 18.3 was released less than a week ago while today Mesa 18.3.1 was issued due to an error in the Vulkan specification.

While Qualcomm was busy hosting their Tech Summit this week in Hawaii, the independent open-source developers were pressing ahead with their reverse-engineered Qualcomm Adreno 3D graphics driver support.

Mesa 18.3 is now available as the latest quarterly feature update to these open-source OpenGL and Vulkan graphics drivers for Linux.

The sixth and final release candidate of Mesa 18.3 is now available for last minute testing of this quarterly Mesa3D update.

Mesa developers have been discussing on and off in recent months about dropping their Autotools build system support considering there is also the SCons build support, Android build system support, and most notably is the increasingly mature Meson build system coverage.

Mesa 18.3 release manager Emil Velikov announced the release of Mesa 18.3-RC5 on Thursday as this cycle enters overtime due to an active blocker bug.

It looks like open-source AMD driver developer Marek Olšák is finishing out the month by working on a few remaining extensions to benefit not only their RadeonSI driver but also the old R600g and other Mesa drivers.

While Mesa 18.3 is due to be released in the days ahead, the Mesa 18.2 bi-weekly stable point releases are continuing for the time being and today marks the v18.2.6 release.

AMD's Marek Olšák known for his many additions and performance optimizations to RadeonSI and who is leading Mesa development this year with the most commits has been working on some AMDGPU winsys optimizations.