Arriving in time before the holiday season, Mesa 19.3 has now been officially released giving all open source Linux graphics drivers some big boosts and new features.
What is Mesa? Is it a tasty biscuit? Do I have Mesa? If you have an AMD or Intel GPU then yes, you will be using Mesa (unless you changed it, 99% of distributions come with Mesa out of the box) and it's what powers your GPU enabling it to talk to OpenGL and Vulkan.
Don't be too hasty to upgrade right away though, with brand new releases there's always a few gremlins hiding ready to crash your games. The Mesa team always suggest waiting for the first point release 19.3.1 if you're concerned with stability and reliability.
If you're looking for a user-friendly list of what's new, the official 19.3 release notes are not the droids you're looking for. Thankfully, Phoronix has their usual feature overview. In this release you can expect support for the new ACO shader compiler which Valve funded, OpenGL 4.6 support for Intel GPUs, many more Vulkan extensions support added, support for newer AMD and Intel GPUs, bug fixes, performance improvements and so on.
Do we have to do something to use ACO by default? I'm using Mesa 20 but I don't know if ACO is activated
By default radv uses llvm but you can activate ACO backend by setting RADV_PERFTEST=aco env variable. If you want to globally set ACO as default backend, then you should export this variable in .bash_profile. Still, remember that ACO is still experimental so I wouldn't suggest to enable it globally.
you can activate ACO backend by setting RADV_PERFTEST=aco env variable.
Does it work if I put
DRI_PRIME=1 RADV_PERFTEST=aco %command%
in the launch option of the game?
you can activate ACO backend by setting RADV_PERFTEST=aco env variable.
Does it work if I putDRI_PRIME=1 RADV_PERFTEST=aco %command%
in the launch option of the game?
Yes, that's exactly how you should enable it
you can activate ACO backend by setting RADV_PERFTEST=aco env variable.
Does it work if I putDRI_PRIME=1 RADV_PERFTEST=aco %command%
in the launch option of the game?
RADV_PERFTEST=aco %command% can be used as a launch option for any Steam game.
To use it in all applications with Manjaro, add RADV_PERFTEST=aco in /etc/environment
Last edited by Lolo01 on 14 December 2019 at 8:30 am UTC
Also, the pace seems to have slightly accelerated after Navi release in July 2019.
Last edited by Shmerl on 13 December 2019 at 7:38 pm UTC
anyone with a PPA that has it already?? oibaf it's on 20.0-dev and sometimes padoka just takes too long.
Take the one kisak provides:
-> https://launchpad.net/~kisak/+archive/ubuntu/kisak-mesa
That's the one I linked. :)anyone with a PPA that has it already?? oibaf it's on 20.0-dev and sometimes padoka just takes too long.
Take the one kisak provides:
-> https://launchpad.net/~kisak/+archive/ubuntu/kisak-mesa
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