Mesa 19.2 released to push open source graphics drivers

I have the Mesa aco drivers should I stick with that or go with this one

I have the Mesa aco drivers should I stick with that or go with this one

If you want to use valve compiler for AMD GPU you should stick with your current drivers or use a bleeding-edge version of Mesa (aco was merged and will be shipping with Mesa 19.3).

From my point of view, your best option is to keep at system wide a stable version of Mesa and compile ACO drivers by yourself. That way you will have a stable system and you will also be able to use ACO on the games/app you prefer.

EDIT: worth mention that compiling may not be mandatory if you have an Ubuntu based distro. In that case you can unpack deb files of a Mesa-ACO ppa in specific directories in order to get the driver running (the same should be possible with arch based distros).


Last edited by x_wing on 25 September 2019 at 8:29 pm UTC

The new Intel driver "Iris" looks really promising: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=mesa-192-iris&num=1

I have the Mesa aco drivers should I stick with that or go with this one

You should stick with the ACO repository. Not everything that ACO needs was merged yet.
Namely some NIR bits.

I have the Mesa aco drivers should I stick with that or go with this one

If you want to use valve compiler for AMD GPU you should stick with your current drivers or use a bleeding-edge version of Mesa (aco was merged and will be shipping with Mesa 19.3).

From my point of view, your best option is to keep at system wide a stable version of Mesa and compile ACO drivers by yourself. That way you will have a stable system and you will also be able to use ACO on the games/app you prefer.

EDIT: worth mention that compiling may not be mandatory if you have an Ubuntu based distro. In that case you can unpack deb files of a Mesa-ACO ppa in specific directories in order to get the driver running (the same should be possible with arch based distros).

You lost me at "compile". I kept at it, but then there was something about unpack deb files. Jesus, it's 2019. This isn't 2012 Linux anymore. Either it'll work by adding a package/snap, or at worst, I have to add a PPA. Compiling? C'mon.

In all seriousness, I didn't understand pretty much any of your answer. And while I realise that ignorance is nothing to be proud of, if this is what we need to learn to play games on Linux, we've already lost this fight, I think. No idea what "KDE Neon" architecture is, but it sounds like Gentoo, Slackware, or Arch - totally hardcore. Not my scene (obviously).

I have the Mesa aco drivers should I stick with that or go with this one

Personally I would stick with what you have, if you are using valves repo/ppa, you get access to the updates before they're upstreamed and from my personal experience it's working very well already. It's easy enough to disable aco in favour of llvm on a per game basis with RADV_PERFTEST=llvm if you do encounter any problems.

When the project has matured more and is enabled by default in mesa, then I will probably switch back to mesa stable or mesa-git.

I have the Mesa aco drivers should I stick with that or go with this one

If you want to use valve compiler for AMD GPU you should stick with your current drivers or use a bleeding-edge version of Mesa (aco was merged and will be shipping with Mesa 19.3).

From my point of view, your best option is to keep at system wide a stable version of Mesa and compile ACO drivers by yourself. That way you will have a stable system and you will also be able to use ACO on the games/app you prefer.

EDIT: worth mention that compiling may not be mandatory if you have an Ubuntu based distro. In that case you can unpack deb files of a Mesa-ACO ppa in specific directories in order to get the driver running (the same should be possible with arch based distros).

You lost me at "compile". I kept at it, but then there was something about unpack deb files. Jesus, it's 2019. This isn't 2012 Linux anymore. Either it'll work by adding a package/snap, or at worst, I have to add a PPA. Compiling? C'mon.

In all seriousness, I didn't understand pretty much any of your answer. And while I realise that ignorance is nothing to be proud of, if this is what we need to learn to play games on Linux, we've already lost this fight, I think. No idea what "KDE Neon" architecture is, but it sounds like Gentoo, Slackware, or Arch - totally hardcore. Not my scene (obviously).

I understand that it can sound complex and difficult (still, believe it or not compiling mesa only requires to run three commands... after you resolve a ton of dependencies :P) but it is only related to being able to use an experimental driver with the flexibility I suggested.

To be fair, the easiest and simple way to test mesa-aco is to keep it installed system wide and that requires as much knowledge as installing a beta driver on Windows (if not less). So the learning curve for playing games on Linux is not different to Windows even if you want to play around with experimental features.

BTW, KDE Neon is a Ubuntu based distro. No black magic involved and it's a nice distro if you like to get KDE latest releases.


Last edited by x_wing on 26 September 2019 at 3:05 am UTC

I have been delayed in building my 3900X/X570. I am building a 48inX48in CNC router instead. However when I can afford a new PC build I will be buying some sort of factory OC 5700XT. So far my favorite would be the Sapphire Nitro, followed by the ASUS Strix, and then the Powercolor Red Devil - and they are all three completely sold out. However, when I can settle on something, I expect these drivers to be rather a welcome change from the NVIDIA experience.

I have the Mesa aco drivers should I stick with that or go with this one

If you want to use valve compiler for AMD GPU you should stick with your current drivers or use a bleeding-edge version of Mesa (aco was merged and will be shipping with Mesa 19.3).

From my point of view, your best option is to keep at system wide a stable version of Mesa and compile ACO drivers by yourself. That way you will have a stable system and you will also be able to use ACO on the games/app you prefer.

EDIT: worth mention that compiling may not be mandatory if you have an Ubuntu based distro. In that case you can unpack deb files of a Mesa-ACO ppa in specific directories in order to get the driver running (the same should be possible with arch based distros).

You lost me at "compile". I kept at it, but then there was something about unpack deb files. Jesus, it's 2019. This isn't 2012 Linux anymore. Either it'll work by adding a package/snap, or at worst, I have to add a PPA. Compiling? C'mon.

In all seriousness, I didn't understand pretty much any of your answer. And while I realise that ignorance is nothing to be proud of, if this is what we need to learn to play games on Linux, we've already lost this fight, I think. No idea what "KDE Neon" architecture is, but it sounds like Gentoo, Slackware, or Arch - totally hardcore. Not my scene (obviously).

Oh, please. If you want the latest, bleeding-edge, experimental stuff (like ACO), then you are obviously going to dirty your hands. The ecosystem around them isn't mature, the projects cannot necessarily be considered "stable", and are not included by default in most "simple" environments :)

I mean, this is like trying to perform some extreme overclocking, and complaining that you have to learn stuff on CPU and memory architecture. Or buying a custom set of "performance" parts for your car, and complaining about having to bolt them on yourself.

It isn't that hard to do or learn, but are you sure that's really what you want, if you are not prepared to spend some time learning?

Personally, even though I could do it, and have done so occasionally, I prefer to stay with the defaults, and spend my energy elsewhere ;)


Last edited by MayeulC on 26 September 2019 at 12:27 pm UTC

I have the Mesa aco drivers should I stick with that or go with this one

If you want to use valve compiler for AMD GPU you should stick with your current drivers or use a bleeding-edge version of Mesa (aco was merged and will be shipping with Mesa 19.3).

From my point of view, your best option is to keep at system wide a stable version of Mesa and compile ACO drivers by yourself. That way you will have a stable system and you will also be able to use ACO on the games/app you prefer.

EDIT: worth mention that compiling may not be mandatory if you have an Ubuntu based distro. In that case you can unpack deb files of a Mesa-ACO ppa in specific directories in order to get the driver running (the same should be possible with arch based distros).

You lost me at "compile". I kept at it, but then there was something about unpack deb files. Jesus, it's 2019. This isn't 2012 Linux anymore. Either it'll work by adding a package/snap, or at worst, I have to add a PPA. Compiling? C'mon.

In all seriousness, I didn't understand pretty much any of your answer. And while I realise that ignorance is nothing to be proud of, if this is what we need to learn to play games on Linux, we've already lost this fight, I think. No idea what "KDE Neon" architecture is, but it sounds like Gentoo, Slackware, or Arch - totally hardcore. Not my scene (obviously).

Oh, please. If you want the latest, bleeding-edge, experimental stuff (like ACO), then you are obviously going to dirty your hands. The ecosystem around them isn't mature, the projects cannot necessarily be considered "stable", and are not included by default in most "simple" environments :)

I mean, this is like trying to perform some extremem overclocking, and complaining that you have to learn stuff on CPU and memory architecture. Or buying a custom set of "performance" parts for your car, and complaining about having to bolt them on yourself.

It isn't that hard to do or learn, but are you sure that's reeally what you want, if you are not prepared to spend some time learning?

Personally, even though I could do it, and have done so occasionaly, I prefer to stay with the defaults, and spend my energy elsewhere ;)

Yep, x_wing already answered to this effect. The fact that this is all very experimental/cutting-edge was lost on me when I typed my comment. Like you, I prefer to just "play games" these days. My interest in that level of tinkering pretty much dried up when Steam launched on Linux and the whole experience became that much more mainstream.

Cool, better performace is always better ^^. Only thing i never got or understood, some here seems to still want to stick with an older mesa. Any reason for this? And how do one still stick with an older version?
I use manjaro so I mostly dont bother, the community tests everything before it goes on the stabel version of manjaro. And I havent got any hickups before, still the more you know :).

I have the Mesa aco drivers should I stick with that or go with this one

If you want to use valve compiler for AMD GPU you should stick with your current drivers or use a bleeding-edge version of Mesa (aco was merged and will be shipping with Mesa 19.3).

From my point of view, your best option is to keep at system wide a stable version of Mesa and compile ACO drivers by yourself. That way you will have a stable system and you will also be able to use ACO on the games/app you prefer.

EDIT: worth mention that compiling may not be mandatory if you have an Ubuntu based distro. In that case you can unpack deb files of a Mesa-ACO ppa in specific directories in order to get the driver running (the same should be possible with arch based distros).

You lost me at "compile". I kept at it, but then there was something about unpack deb files. Jesus, it's 2019. This isn't 2012 Linux anymore. Either it'll work by adding a package/snap, or at worst, I have to add a PPA. Compiling? C'mon.

In all seriousness, I didn't understand pretty much any of your answer. And while I realise that ignorance is nothing to be proud of, if this is what we need to learn to play games on Linux, we've already lost this fight, I think. No idea what "KDE Neon" architecture is, but it sounds like Gentoo, Slackware, or Arch - totally hardcore. Not my scene (obviously).

Oh, please. If you want the latest, bleeding-edge, experimental stuff (like ACO), then you are obviously going to dirty your hands. The ecosystem around them isn't mature, the projects cannot necessarily be considered "stable", and are not included by default in most "simple" environments :)

I mean, this is like trying to perform some extremem overclocking, and complaining that you have to learn stuff on CPU and memory architecture. Or buying a custom set of "performance" parts for your car, and complaining about having to bolt them on yourself.

It isn't that hard to do or learn, but are you sure that's reeally what you want, if you are not prepared to spend some time learning?

Personally, even though I could do it, and have done so occasionaly, I prefer to stay with the defaults, and spend my energy elsewhere ;)

Yep, x_wing already answered to this effect. The fact that this is all very experimental/cutting-edge was lost on me when I typed my comment. Like you, I prefer to just "play games" these days. My interest in that level of tinkering pretty much dried up when Steam launched on Linux and the whole experience became that much more mainstream.

My apologies, I didn't mean to lecture you on this. I was still asleep when I wrote this, and it wasn't clear to me that x_wing had already pointed out this was an experimental project :P

Hopefully, this work will end up profiting every mesa driver. I can see some shader being initially compiled with ACO, then being asynchronously replaced by a more performance-optimized version a bit later, if needs be :)

But yeah, these days, I try not to bother with all of this; that's why I bought a Ryzen "X" series: the promises of automatic overclocking won me over :D

Cool, better performace is always better ^^. Only thing i never got or understood, some here seems to still want to stick with an older mesa. Any reason for this? And how do one still stick with an older version?
I use manjaro so I mostly dont bother, the community tests everything before it goes on the stabel version of manjaro. And I havent got any hickups before, still the more you know :).

Well, I guess they are using their distro packages. And it's often distro policy (Debian, Slackware) to follow "if it ain't broken, don't fix it": no major upgrades between distribution releases, because you risk breaking stuff that's already working. That's stability at all cost, which is great for some uses. Your stuff won't necessarily work better with updates, but at least it won't be worse.


Last edited by MayeulC on 26 September 2019 at 12:38 pm UTC

Well, I guess they are using their distro packages. And it's often distro policy (Debian, Slackware) to follow "if it ain't broken, don't fix it": no major upgrades between distribution releases, because you risk breaking stuff that's already working. That's stability at all cost, which is great for some uses. Your stuff won't necessarily work better with updates, but at least it won't be worse.

Its arch based and somewhat "cutting edge". Only difference from arch seems to be, they test it a bit harder before it gets out to the stable version of manjaro. So Im sure they will put out the new mesa version if its doing fine in testing :).