14 DAY TRIAL // Today, November 11, 2016, Collabora's Emil Velikov announced the availability of the Release Candidate (RC) development snapshot of the upcoming first point release of the Mesa 13.0.0 3D Graphics Library.
On the first day of November, we reported on the release of the massive Mesa 13.0.0 3D Graphics Library, which introduced a large number of new features and improvements, among which we can mention the long anticipated OpenGL 4.4 and OpenGL 4.5 capability, the new Radeon Vulkan driver (RADV) for supported AMD Radeon GPUs by the AMDGPU kernel driver, as well as OpenGL ES 3.2 support for Intel Skylake or later.
There are many great features in the Mesa 13.0.0 3D Graphics Library, but there's room for improvements. For example, the OpenGL 4.4/4.5 support could not have been displayed properly on some Linux systems due to the pending Khronos CTS validation, which might be fixed in the Mesa 13.0.1 release. And it looks like the first Mesa 13.0.0 point release is about to land this weekend, possibly on November 13, 2016.
As the headline implies, Mesa 13.0.1 promises a huge number of fixes in the Vulkan drivers, adding an up to 30% performance increase for the Intel Vulkan (ANV) driver, as well as support for distinctly named JSON files that include the full Vulkan driver path for the Radeon Vulkan (RADV) driver, allowing users to use the driver outside the /usr/lib directory.
More RADV improvements, GLX GLVND driver fixes
Apart from the goodies mentioned above, Mesa 13.0.1 3D Graphics Library adds proper advertising of the Xlib platform extension support in the Radeon Vulkan driver, which can be used alongside the Dolphin emulator, implements better handling of Xlib and XCB connections in both Intel and Radeon Vulkan drivers, along with support for advertising the correct versions of the supported extensions.
Other than that, there are multiple fixes for the GLX GLVND driver, and it looks like the interoperation between the libGL and libEGL libraries of Mesa and the third-party OpenCL implementation were restored. The Release Candidate build of the Mesa 13.0.1 3D Graphics Library is available for download right now from our website if you want to take it for a test drive. The full changelog is attached below.