The Mesa developers have been plugging away to get Mesa 17.1 into shape for release, one feature in particular has seen a lot of attention: the shader cache. It will no longer use a percentage of available disk space.
AMD have released their AMDGPU-PRO 17.10 driver which includes a few important fixes as well as official support for Ubuntu 16.04.2 64bit. It should also fix a Mad Max Vulkan issue.
Timo Aaltonen noted on his blog that the 'Ubuntu-X' team now have an 'Updates' PPA for you to get the latest Mesa on Ubuntu 16.04 and Ubuntu 16.10.
A Mesa developer wrote up a blog post about the conformance of the open source Mesa Vulkan driver 'radv' for AMD.
The code for OpenGL threaded GL dispatch is now finally in Mesa-git, after multiple developers attempts to fix it up. This should improve performance in multiple games for users of the open source Mesa drivers.
Seems Valve really are trying to do a big push to get Linux graphics drivers up to scratch. Last night Pierre-Loup tweeted about a new hiring and the name might be familiar to some.
It seems Feral Interactive are busy bees behind the scenes towards something, as one of their developers has sent in another patch for the Mesa 'radv' Vulkan driver.
It seems Feral Interactive are continuing to help development of the Vulkan 'radv' AMD driver in Mesa, as they have pushed another patch.
The latest and greatest Mesa release 17.1 is due for release on May 5th, so not long for everything to get polished up.
DiRT Rally seemed to have an issue with rendering properly in certain cases with newer versions of LLVM with RadeonSI Mesa (AMD), but it seems to have been tracked down as an issue in LLVM.
The work on the threaded GL dispatch code for Mesa has been picked up by Timothy Arceri as Marek is now busy with other work.
Since we get a few comments here and there asking what Mesa is and what graphics cards will use it, here’s my attempt at clearing it up for you.
I'm sure plenty of you will be happy with this, as Mesa now has the shader cache enabled by default in Mesa-git to allow for wider testing. It may be turned off for Mesa 17.1, if wider testing shows issues with it.
NVIDIA have released another beta of their Vulkan driver, which includes a fix for a major problem with SteamVR.
Good news for AMD GPU owners on open source drivers, as Mesa-git now has a shader cache enabled for r600 and radeonsi.
NVIDIA has release the 378.13 stable driver which directly follows on from their work on the 378.09 beta driver.
The recent Mesa release of Mesa 17.0.0 included a patch from a Feral Interactive developer, but Feral aren't stopping there. Another developer from Feral has had two patches accepted into Mesa-git today.
The Mesa developers have announced the release of Mesa 17.0.0 and it's a truly incredible release. You should probably update as soon as possible.
You may remember recently I wrote about 'threaded GL dispatch' in Mesa possibly getting merged, after AMD's Marek suggested it and there was some backlash, well, it has continued.
Just a note to not get overly excited about threaded OpenGL in Mesa. While it's true it could help a bunch of games, there's also games it likely won't help or even make worse. Feral Interactive's ports already do it, and I'm sure others do too.
