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This release is a bit massive when it comes to actually looking at the features. Everything we have been hyped about recently is now in the stable release.

The big two:
- All vendors now have OpenGL 4.4 and 4.5, but you likely need to manually enable them as they haven't passed the required validation by Khronos.

- AMD now has Vulkan support in Mesa using the "radv" driver. It remains to be seen what happens with this driver, as AMD did plan to open source their own effort at some point.

For the rest, see the release announcement:
Quote- Vulkan driver for hardware supported by the AMDGPU kernel driver*
- OpenGL 4.4/4.5 capability, yet the drivers may expose lower version due to
pending Khronos CTS validation.

- OpenGL ES 3.1 on i965/hsw
- OpenGL ES 3.2 on i965/gen9+ (Skylake and later)
- More than a dozen GL extensions across the drivers

- GLX: Windows-DRI support
- EGL: support for EGL_KHR_debug support and KHR_no_config_context
- EGL: official support for EGL_MESA_platform_surfaceless
- EGL: improvements and fixes for the Wayland, Android and X11/DRI3 backends

- VAAPI: H264 encode support
- OMX: H265 decode support


Amazing progress, and I am keen to see them continue to work on performance now that the main parts of OpenGL are implemented. Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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6 comments

GustyGhost Nov 1, 2016
Liam Dawe Nov 1, 2016
I approve, both for the funny and for Starship Troopers, good taste.
Trollwut Nov 1, 2016
Wow, this is great news! Do we have a recent comparism of the performance nouveau against proprietary?
Shmerl Nov 2, 2016
nouveau is still not usable for gaming, because of lack of reclocking support. May be it will change once radeonsi will becomes clearly better than closed OpenGL from AMD and Nvidia will notice that Linux gamers are ditching it more and more. But I simply don't care at this point. Let Nvidia stay obtuse, I'm switching to AMD once Vega cards will come out.


Last edited by Shmerl on 2 November 2016 at 2:48 am UTC
tuubi Nov 2, 2016
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Quoting: ShmerlMay be it will change once radeonsi will becomes clearly better than closed OpenGL from AMD and Nvidia will notice that Linux gamers are ditching it more and more.
It won't change until Nvidia sees this affecting their business. And that won't happen as long as their enterprise clients and--less importantly--most Linux gamers are willing to use their proprietary blob. Let's hope AMD's efforts bear fruit and Nvidia is forced to notice. This is about corporate inertia, not malice.

I'm not endorsing Nvidia here, by any means. I'm chuffed that AMD is finally getting back into the game so to speak, and I love that the next time I'm in the market for a GPU, I've actually got a choice that isn't so clearly between freedom and performance.
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