Mesa 17.1 has now been released

The latest release of the open-source graphics drivers has now been made available following the final release candidate. There's plenty of new things to love in this release.

The 17.1 release has a spate of bugfixes and new features that make it well worth upgrading to.

You can look at the announcement and release notes yourself, but a few key highlights include:

• Shader on-disk cache
• Experimental threaded GL dispatch
• Support for more OpenGL extensions in various drivers that are not part of a specific OpenGL version
• Many improvements to the Vulkan drivers, with radv reaching unofficial full compliance with the Khronos CTS
• Heaps and heaps of bugfixes and performance improvements for games

According to a note, this release has around 3000 commits from approximately 140 developers, which translates to 500 more commits and 20 more authors than the previous 17.0 release. Feral Interactive also gets a shout out for offering keys to Mesa developers with more than 25 commits.

I’ve been a Mesa user for years now and I bought my RX 480 last year specifically because of how awesome it is to see the breakneck speed of development of the open drivers. It’s incredible how much is done day-to-day, let alone release-to-release. For some time, I have taken to running the latest git of Mesa just to play around with all these massive changes as they get implemented. With game developers like Feral and Valve offering keys to Mesa devs as well, we’re seeing more and more changes that benefit performance in games and fix bugs.

Overall, fantastic work from everyone involved!