The latest and greatest in open source graphics drivers has released with Mesa 20.2.0, although you should wait on it if you're after a stable experience.
As always, the Mesa team suggest waiting on at least the first bug fix release with Mesa 20.2.1 which is usually out within a few weeks. Developer Dylan Baker who announced the new release mentioned to expect some more regular releases for the 20.2 series, as they're back from a long vacation.
What's new? Lots, as always. Support for new Vulkan extensions, added support for new GPUs including initial work done for AMD's upcoming RDNA 2 noted as "gfx10.3", expanded GLES 3.2 and OpenGL 4.5 support for LLVMpipe, lots of work on the Panfrost driver for Mali GPUs. You can find some release notes for Mesa 20.2.0 here.
One of the big items this release is for AMD, as the ACO shader compiler announced by Valve has now been switched on as the default for the RADV Vulkan driver although you can still set a debug option to go back to LLVM. This means that you should see smoother gameplay overall with modern AMD GPUs when using Vulkan, and perhaps better overall framerates too. If you want a little more info about ACO, you can see this previous article with the highlights and video from the recent XDC 2020 conference.
Need to learn more about Mesa drivers? See the official site.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
And that is not the first time for Mesa, so it is pretty sure it will get into 20.10, and then into 20.04 about 3 months later when 20.04 also gets the 5.8 kernel and xorg from 20.10 and a new installer 20.04.2 with those included.
Edit: Mesa 20.2 is in groovy now https://packages.ubuntu.com/search?suite=groovy&searchon=names&keywords=mesa in time for the release of 20.10
Last edited by Redface on 7 October 2020 at 7:20 pm UTC
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