News: 0001515703

  ARM Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life (Terry Pratchett, Jingo)

Mesa's Terrific Year With Better Vulkan Ray-Tracing, NVK Progress & Same-Day Vulkan 1.4

([Mesa] 3 Hours Ago Mesa 2024)


The open-source Mesa 3D graphics driver had a rather great year with a number of performance optimizations landing, on-time support for Intel Lunar Lake and Battlemage Xe2 graphics, early AMD RDNA4 support, multiple drivers having same-day Vulkan 1.4 support, the continued progress of the open-source NVIDIA NVK Vulkan driver, and much more thanks to the contributions of Intel, AMD, Valve, and other organizations -- even Microsoft's continued merge requests!

In summing up the hundreds of Mesa news articles over the past year on Phoronix, below is a look at the most popular news for the Mesa drivers over the course of 2024. A concise look at all of the top highlights for the open-source 3D graphics stack in 2024.

[1]Open-Source NVIDIA Driver Moving To NVK + Zink For OpenGL On Newer GPUs

Mesa 24.1 Git has landed the initial infrastructure for allowing drivers to choose to using Zink instead for OpenGL via this OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation. The motivating factor for this latest Mesa work is for using Zink atop the NVK Vulkan driver for newer NVIDIA GPUs.

[2]Blumenkrantz "Massively Improves" Mesa's glReadPixels Performance With 7 Lines Of Code

Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve's open-source/Linux graphics driver team has submitted a merge request to "massively" improve the OpenGL glReadPixels performance within the common Mesa state tracker.

[3]Open-Source Radeon Vulkan Driver Improvement Scores Huge Ray-Tracing Wins

A change merged today for Mesa 24.0 is yielding much better Vulkan ray-tracing performance for the Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" across a number of games.

[4]Valve Lands A Last Minute AMD ACO Improvement For Mesa 24.0

This week prior to the Mesa 24.0 feature freeze / code branching, a notable merge request landed that had been worked on the past few months by one of Valve's open-source Linux graphics driver developers.

[5]Cassia Aims To Pair Wine/DXVK/VKD3D-Proton/FEX For Windows Games On Android

Cassia is an in-development effort for running Microsoft Windows desktop games on Android. This work-in-progress effort is essentially akin to the Steam Play approach but targeted for Android users by leveraging Wine, DXVK, VKD3D-Proton, and then FEX for emulating x86_64 binaries on AArch64.

[6]Mesa's NVIDIA Vulkan Driver "NVK" Now Exposes Vulkan 1.3 Support

The NVK driver within Mesa for open-source NVIDIA GPU support for the Vulkan API that works with the Nouveau DRM kernel driver is now capable of advertising Vulkan 1.3 API support.

[7]Mesa 24.0 Released With Faster Radeon RADV Ray-Tracing & Initial PowerVR Vulkan Driver

Mesa 24.0 made its very punctual debut today as the Q1'2024 feature update to this set of open-source OpenGL, Vulkan, OpenCL, and video acceleration drivers most notably used by Linux systems. From upstreaming of the Imagination PowerVR Vulkan driver to lots of Intel and AMD Radeon improvements as always, Mesa 24.0 is another great update that benefits most Linux desktop users from basic video acceleration and 3D to the most devoted Intel and AMD Linux gamers.

[8]Google Begins Upstreaming Fuchsia OS Support Into Mesa 3D

With not hearing much about Fuchsia OS in a while and the Fuchsia OS team being hit hard by layoffs last year, coming as a surprise today is seeing Google beginning to upstream Fuchsia OS support into the Mesa 3D graphics driver stack.

[9]The Significant Corporate Importance & Pressure Around Mesa Open-Source Linux 3D Drivers

It has taken many years but the Mesa 3D open-source graphics drivers have proven very successful from the open-source AMD Vulkan and OpenGL drivers proving they can be capable of competing with the closed-source drivers not only for gaming but also workstation tasks, the Windows vs. Linux graphics driver performance gap largely closed, Microsoft even leveraging Mesa for their translations to the D3D12 API, vendors like Imagination developing once unthinkable open-source drivers, etc. But with the increasing importance to corporations, so has the responsibilities and concerns of Mesa driver developers.

[10]UWP'ed Mesa Running On Microsoft Xbox, Allowing For New Game Ports With OpenGL

Recently there has been out-of-tree successes on adapting Mesa to work on Microsoft's Universal Windows Platform (UWP). UWP is also used by the Microsoft Xbox Series X/S game consoles and in turn paired with the Microsoft D3D12 driver work within Mesa for allowing OpenGL and other APIs atop D3D12, is allowing new games/software to be ported to the Xbox.

[11]Vulkan Video Now Enabled By Default For Radeon VCN2/VCN3 Hardware On Linux

An exciting merge today for the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver with next quarter's Mesa 25.0 is enabling Vulkan Video API support by default for AMD graphics having VCN 2.x and VCN 3.x hardware.

[12]Open-Source NVIDIA Vulkan Driver "NVK" Lands Improvements For ReBAR

The open-source NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver within Mesa 24.1-devel has seen improvements made for systems capable of Resizable BAR "ReBAR" support.

[13]Mesa's CPU-Based Vulkan Driver Now Supports Ray-Tracing

The performance is likely to be atrocious, but the Mesa Lavapipe driver implementing the Vulkan API for CPU-based execution has rolled out support for Vulkan ray-tracing.

[14]Mesa 24.2 Released With New Vulkan Extensions, New Shader Cache

Mesa 24.2 is out today as stable for this quarterly feature release to these open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers used commonly on Linux systems and other platforms.

[15]Mesa 24.1 Zink Lands "Super Fast" Merge Request To Optimize IO

Mike Blumenkrantz with Valve's open-source Linux graphics driver team has merged a big optimization / bug fixing effort he's recently been tackling for the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver.

[16]Open-Source Apple GPU Vulkan Driver Merged For Mesa 24.3

Merged today for Q4's Mesa 24.3 feature release is a brand new open-source Vulkan driver: Honeykrisp, the driver providing Vulkan API support for Apple Silicon GPUs as part of the Asahi Linux effort.

[17]Mesa Developers Aren't Convinced Over Dropping Old OpenGL Drivers Right Now

Earlier this week was a proposal for creating a new Mesa legacy driver branch for clearing out older OpenGL drivers like the ATI R300, AMD R600, Lima, Nouveau NV30, and other older GPU drivers. However, other upstream Mesa developers aren't convinced by the proposal.

[18]Lavapipe CPU-Based Vulkan Driver Implements Ray-Tracing Pipelines

Mesa's Lavapipe driver as a software (CPU-based) implementation of the Vulkan API has now implemented support for ray-tracing pipelines.

[19]Mesa Vulkan Drivers Reach An Inflection Point: Idea Raised To Be More Like Gallium3D

With Mesa's Gallium3D architecture there are different state trackers like for VA-API and OpenGL that in turn run atop the different Gallium3D hardware drivers with an aim for common code re-use and making the most of capabilities for each of the drivers. With Mesa's Vulkan drivers there isn't quite that level of code sharing/re-use given Vulkan's low-level API approach, but now the idea is raised whether the Mesa Vulkan drivers may benefit from a more Gallium3D-like runtime.

[20]NVK, RADV, & Other Mesa Drivers Ready With Launch Day Vulkan 1.4 Support

Years ago when new OpenGL spec releases would occur, it could take months or years for the open-source Mesa drivers to catch-up in supporting the latest versions... Thankfully in the Vulkan space it continues to prove to be a very different story. As we've seen with prior Vulkan specs, today's Vulkan 1.4 spec release is greeted by same-day Mesa patches.

[21]Rust-Written OpenCL Driver Now Works On Raspberry Pi GPUs

Mesa's Rusticl driver as a Rust-based OpenCL driver for GPUs backed by Gallium3D support now works with the Broadcom V3D driver. This V3D support is notable as it's most commonly associated with the Raspberry Pi single board computers.

[22]Raspberry Pi "V3DV" Vulkan Driver Now Supports Dynamic Rendering

Merged this week into Mesa 24.1 for the Broadcom VideoCore V3DV Vulkan driver that is most notably used by the latest Raspberry Pi boards is support for VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering.

[23]New Patches Significantly Reduce Zink Driver Startup Time

Given a two year old bug against Mesa around slow initialization/start-up time for GTK4 on Intel graphics, prolific Zink developer Mike Blumenkrantz recently took to optimizing Zink's start-up time for this generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver implementation.

[24]Mesa 24.3 Lands "The Juiciest Refactor Ever"

Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve landed another interesting patch series in Mesa Git for next quarter's Mesa 24.3... This is what he proclaims to be "THE JUICIEST REFACTOR EVER" for the Mesa GLX code.

[25]Another Optimization Comes For Radeon RADV Ray-Tracing In Mesa 24.1

Valve contractor Friedrich Vock who is part of the team working on the open-source Linux graphics drivers has merged another RADV ray-tracing optimization for this open-source AMD Vulkan driver with this improvement in next quarter's Mesa 24.1 release.

[26]Mesa Looks At Making The Zink Driver Build By Default

With the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver implementation continuing to prove itself robust and as performant as native hardware OpenGL drivers, the Mesa developers continue exploring new opportunities for it. Given its successes, a merge request has been opened so Zink would become part of the default drivers built by Mesa out-of-the-box without needing to manually enable it for compilation.

[27]Mesa 24.2-rc1 Released With Many OpenGL & Vulkan Driver Improvements

Eric Engestrom is once again serving as the Mesa release manager and today took to forking the Mesa 24.2 codebase followed by issuing the first release candidate.

[28]Teflon Merged To Mesa 24.1 As Gallium3D Frontend For TensorFlow Lite

Teflon has been merged into Mesa 24.1 as a Gallium3D front-end that TensorFlow can load for delegating the execution of operations in a neural network model. Teflon was created initially for the Etnaviv Gallium3D driver for being able to run AI inferencing on Vivante NPUs.

[29]Mesa's PanVK Vulkan Driver Prepares For Arm Mali Valhall Support

Mesa's PanVK driver that provides open-source Vulkan API support for Arm Mali graphics is preparing to support newer "Valhall" hardware.

[30]Mesa 24.0-rc3 Up For Testing, Mesa 23.3.4 Out As Stable

Eric Engestrom with Igalia continues doing a stellar job maintaining the Mesa 23.3 stable series while also leading the Mesa 24.0 release candidates for that upcoming Q1'2024 stable series.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Zink-NVK-For-NVIDIA-OpenGL

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Blumenkrantz-glReadPixels-Perf

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/RADV-RT-Much-Faster-Mesa-24.0

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-ACO-Last-Minute-Mesa-24.0

[5] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Cassia-Windows-Games-Android

[6] https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVK-Vulkan-1.3-Mesa-24.1

[7] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-24.0-Released

[8] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Fuchsia-OS-Simple-Mesa-Support

[9] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-Revert-For-SPECViewPerf

[10] https://www.phoronix.com/news/UWP-Mesa-Xbox-Port

[11] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Vulkan-Video-VCN2-VCN3-Default

[12] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-NVK-Vulkan-NVIDIA-ReBAR

[13] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-Lavapipe-Vulkan-RayTracing

[14] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-24.2-Released

[15] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-24.1-Zink-ioopt-Merged

[16] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Apple-Vulkan-Driver-Mesa-24.3

[17] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-Devs-On-Keeping-Drivers

[18] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Lavapipe-RT-Pipelines-Mesa-24.1

[19] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-Vulkan-Driver-Runtime

[20] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Vulkan-1.4-Mesa-Drivers

[21] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Rusticl-V3D-OpenCL-Raspberry-Pi

[22] https://www.phoronix.com/news/V3DV-VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering

[23] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Faster-Zink-Start-Time-Patches

[24] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-24.3-Juiciest-Refactor

[25] https://www.phoronix.com/news/RADV-RT-VGPR-Optimize

[26] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-MR-Zink-Default-Drivers

[27] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-24.2-rc1-Released

[28] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Gallium3D-Teflon-Merged

[29] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-PanVK-Valhall-Prep

[30] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-24.0-rc3-Released



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