Mesa 21.2 Released with New Features, Improved Support for Many Games

Mesa 21.2 has been released today as the second major update to the Mesa 21 series of the open-source graphics stack used by all GNU/Linux distributions.

Mesa 21.2 has been in development for the past three months and it brings a plethora of new features to the RADV (Radeon Vulkan) driver in the form of several Vulkan extensions to improve support for Vulkan apps/games, as well as OpenGL ES 3.1 support on GT21x hardware and the Panfrost driver, wideLines support on lavapipe, a new Asahi driver for Apple’s M1 chip, and DRM format modifiers on Zink.

Mesa 21.2 also packs lots of goodies for games, bringing improvements for many popular video games like Cyberpunk 2077, Metro Exodus, Resident Evil Village, Elite Dangerous: Odyssey, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Doom (2016), Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, SCARLET NEXUS, CS:GO, Nuclear Throne, Euro Truck Simulator 2, RuneScape, Mount & Blade: Warband, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, Golf with Your Friends, and Unreal Tournament.

On top of that, Mesa 21.2 brings improvements for popular Linux apps and desktop environments. For example, there’s a fix for a Firefox crash on Wayland, and the KDE Plasma desktop environment received a fix for crash in update_buffers after closing KDE’s “splash screen” downloader, and a fix for incorrect rendering of Plasma’s menu text.

Of course, there are numerous other changes and bug fixes, especially for AMD users, which means better performance in games and better overall graphics for your GNU/Linux distribution. Check out the full release notes for more details on these changes, and make sure that you update to the Mesa 21.2 series as soon as it lands in the stable software repositories of your favorite distro.

However, please note that Mesa 21.2 is considered stable only after the first point release (21.2.1) is published, which should happen in the next few weeks. Mesa 21.2.0 is a new development release with bleeding-edge features, so you’re concerned about the stability and reliability your distro, you should stick to the Mesa 21.1 series.

Last updated 3 years ago