Mesa 17.2 officially released

The open source graphics drivers, Mesa, have been updated to 17.2 which is a major new release bringing in many changes.

It's worth noting, that the Mesa developers recommend waiting until 17.2.1 for people looking for a stable experience.

Here's the major new features they've listed:

• GL_ARB_bindless_texture on radeonsi
• GL_ARB_post_depth_coverage on nvc0 (GM200+)
• GL_ARB_shader_ballot on i965/gen8+
• GL_ARB_shader_group_vote on i965 (with a no-op vec4 implementation)
• GL_ARB_shader_viewport_layer_array on nvc0 (GM200+)
• GL_AMD_vertex_shader_layer on nvc0 (GM200+)
• GL_AMD_vertex_shader_viewport_index on nvc0 (GM200+)

This release expands the threaded OpenGL whitelist, to improve performance in certain games. Games that are already whitelisted include Alien Isolation, Borderlands 2, BioShock Infinite, Civilization 6 and more. You can see the full list here. The performance gain will vary between hardware of course, but it should now be enabled by default.

Of course, on top of that there's heaps of bug fixes and other general improvements and clean-ups. These games particular had some issues solved: Stellaris, The Witcher 2, Rocket League, Dying Light, DOOM 2016 + wine (RADV) and more. So all of those should see some form of improvements on Mesa 17.2. Also, Dawn of War III should now work on Mesa with OpenGL.

Truthfully, since I don't actually make use of Mesa on my main machine I'm not entirely up to scratch on it all. Their release notes could sure use a little work in explaining things at least a little more thoroughly. Still, I don't want to detract from their awesome work as it's a lot of work to summarise I'm sure.

See the release notes here.