While vendors are increasingly just focused on Vulkan (and Direct3D under Windows), there still is plenty of OpenGL software out there especially in the workstation space where software vendors are slow to adapt. Well known RadeonSI OpenGL developer Marek Olšák of AMD landed another performance optimization this week that should benefit the likes of SPECviewperf.

Mesa's Zink is well known for working to provide a generic OpenGL implementation over the Vulkan API that can be used across hardware/drivers. While still focused on OpenGL-over-Vulkan, with some pending patches it turns out Zink can support Gallium3D Nine for ultimately allowing Direct3D 9 atop this layer.

The Zink component to Mesa that provides a generic OpenGL implementation built atop the Vulkan API recently hit another "massively improved performance" milestone by Valve contractor Mike Blumenkrantz.

Merged today into Mesa 21.2-devel is OpenGL ES 3.1 support being exposed for the Panfrost Gallium3D driver that provides open-source Arm Mali graphics.

Mesa's Direct3D 12 driver maintained by Microsoft as part of their WSL and Windows OpenGL-over-D3D12 efforts has added a means of being able to select between multiple GPUs/adapters.

Mesa 21.1.2 is out today as the latest bi-weekly point release for the latest stable Mesa 3D series.

Zink as Mesa's OpenGL implementation atop Vulkan continues seeing a lot of work particularly by Mike Blumenkrantz working under contract for Valve. The latest is a major rework to Zink's shader cache implementation so it will actually work as desired and in an optimal manner.

For those that wait until the first point release of a new quarterly Mesa 3D driver stack feature release before upgrading, now is the time to move to the Mesa 21.1.1 series.

Mike Blumenkrantz working under contract for Valve on the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation continues making remarkable progress on this Mesa code.

Virglrenderer that is part of the open-source Linux effort to provide accelerated OpenGL to guest virtual machines has been enjoying some new micro-optimizations.

Turnip is the open-source Mesa Vulkan driver aligned with the Freedreno effort for Qualcomm Adreno support. Turnip has been in fairly good shape but fixes and other improvements keep flowing in as new Vulkan games/apps continue to be tested on this open-source Adreno Vulkan driver.

Mesa 21.1 is available today as the latest quarterly feature release to this collection of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers. There are many features to show with this new release and it even managed to release on-schedule.

Going on for a few years now has been some Mesa optimizations for AMD Ryzen CPUs and in particular L3 cache optimizations. There is now a fix to re-enable this support after it was mistakenly broken earlier this year.

Those moving to Mesa 21.x releases for the latest open-source GPU driver support on Linux are seemingly finding their Valve "Trust Factor" matchmaking system scores dropping for Counter-Strike: GO, leading to numerous upset Linux gamers with AMD Radeon GPUs.

Alyssa Rosenzweig has continued her work reverse engineering and understanding Apple's M1 GPU with the ultimate goal of writing open-source OpenGL and Vulkan support for the Apple M1 GPU on Linux.

While Zink implements OpenGL 4 and is running an increasing number of games with good performance, one of the simple "demos" it hasn't been able to render correctly in recent years has been glxgears. But that milestone is now crossed once again with the latest Mesa code.

Whether you are a stable Mesa user or living more on the bleeding-edge with Git or development snapshots, there are new updates out today for this collection of open-source Linux GPU drivers.

Well known open-source AMD Linux graphics driver developer Marek Olšák published an initial proposal this week as "a redesign of how Linux graphics drivers work."

Last week 4A Games released Metro Exodus for Linux and while there were a few issues at launch, at least one of them is now resolved.

Red Hat graphics driver developer David Airlie has tried running the DOOM (2016) game on the CPU-based Lavapipe Vulkan driver... It works, but isn't fast and currently requires some hacks.

Alyssa Rosenzweig, known for her work on the Panfrost open-source driver for Arm Mali graphics, has published the latest findings around the Apple M1 graphics processor. In fact, enough understanding to get a shaded, spinning cube rendering on the Apple M1 using a simple demo so far while the open-source driver support is still the goal.

Feature development for this quarter's Mesa 21.1 release is now over with it having been branched from main and the first release candidate issued.

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.

The "Virgl" virtual 3D GPU project for providing OpenGL (and work-in-progress VirtIO-GPU Vulkan) acceleration within guest virtual machines continues to mature for improving the open-source Linux desktop virtualization stack.

It was just a few days ago was the talking of the VirtIO-GPU Vulkan driver looking to be upstreamed into Mesa and now this Google "Venus" project has indeed landed.

This quarter's Mesa 21.1 feature release will continue to offer more improvements for Lavapipe, the CPU-based software Vulkan implementation. The latest today is Vulkan 1.1 now being advertised.

Mesa 21.0.2 is out today as the latest bi-weekly point release to the Mesa3D open-source Vulkan/OpenGL drivers.

The VirtIO-GPU Vulkan driver is looking to be upstreamed in Mesa in allowing Vulkan support for virtualized guests that in turn is handled by the host's Vulkan driver/hardware.

For those that managed to get their hands on Radeon RX 6000 series hardware and are habitual Mesa Git users, the newest Mesa 21.1-devel code for RADV has a new knob for performance testing.

Mesa 21.1 is looking to be another exciting release to be introduced later this quarter while going into feature freeze around mid-April. The latest work to land is threaded context support for Zink, which means faster performance for this OpenGL-over-Vulkan implementation.