Mesa 25.0 feature development is now over with the code having been branched from Mesa Git and the Mesa 25.0-rc1 release candidate issued. Mesa 25.0 is to be the next quarterly feature release for these open-source 3D graphics drivers and will hopefully see its stable debut before the end of February. In turn Mesa 25.0 will be found with the likes of Fedora 42 and Ubuntu 25.04 for providing the newest open-source OpenGL and Vulkan driver support, including for upcoming AMD RDNA4 graphics.
As talked about in many Phoronix articles at this point, Mesa 25.0 brings usable support for AMD Radeon RX 90×0 “RDNA4” graphics with the RadeonSI Gallium3D (OpenGL) and RADV (Vulkan) drivers. The RadeonSI support should be in great shape given it’s worked on directly by AMD while the RADV RDNA4 support is tackled by Valve developers and the initial RDNA4 support is deemed good enough.
Also exciting on the RADV side with Mesa 25.0 is adding Vulkan 1.4 support for that API update introduced in December. The other prominent Mesa Vulkan drivers have also landed Vulkan 1.4 support.
Another win for AMD with Mesa 25.0 is enabling the ACO compiler back-end by default for pre-RDNA GPUs with the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. ACO as an alternative to the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler has seen much work the past quarter. There is also initial AMD user-queue Mesa support for submitting work directly to the GPU(s) to bypass more of the kernel driver overhead. Plus other never-ending work on graphics driver performance optimizations.
Mesa 25.0 is also bringing various Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan enhancements, many new Vulkan extensions supported by the Arm Mali “PanVK” driver, better Qualcomm Adreno Vulkan support with Turnip, and various Intel Xe2 optimizations for Lunar Lake and Battlemage. The Intel ANV Vulkan driver also now supports AV1 video decoding and other new features. The NVK Vulkan driver for NVIDIA GPUs has also seen continued refinements and new feature support.
Mesa 25.0 is a very jam packed release especially for the AMD Radeon and Intel graphics drivers as usual plus respectable work to the various other OpenGL and Vulkan drivers within this large codebase.
The very brief Mesa 25.0-rc1 release announcement can be read on the Mesa mailing list. Eric Engestrom is managing the v25.0 release cycle and weekly release candidates are expected until Mesa 25.0 is ready to officially ship by mid-to-late February.
Mesa Git is now tracking feature development toward Mesa 25.1 for debuting in mid-Q2.
