Mesa 26.0 was just officially released as this quarter’s new feature release for these open-source OpenGL / Gallium3D and Vulkan drivers used commonly on Linux systems and elsewhere like within the confines of Microsoft’s WSL.
Mesa 26.0 is a pretty great release with a lot of performance improvements around Vulkan ray-tracing for the RADV driver. Thanks to Valve’s team in particular there are many significant ray-tracing optimizations with this new version. There are also various new Vulkan driver extensions exposed by RADV as well as the likes of the Intel ANV and NVIDIA NVK drivers too.
Mesa 26.0 also delivers a lot of work as usual for the AMD RadeonSI and RADV, Intel ANV and Iris drivers as well as the open-source NVIDIA “NVK” driver plus work to the many smaller drivers. There is Qualcomm Adreno Gen 8 graphics ready for Snapdragon X2 laptops, PowerVR Vulkan driver improvements, mesh shader support for the Venus Vulkan driver, HDR fixes, RadeonSI Gallium3D now defaulting to the ACO compiler back-end, PanVK driver caching improvements, and much more.
The Mesa 26.0 official release announcement notes the following highlights:
– VK_KHR_relaxed_block_layout on pvr
– VK_KHR_storage_buffer_storage_class on pvr
– VK_EXT_external_memory_acquire_unmodified on panvk
– VK_EXT_discard_rectangles on NVK
– VK_KHR_present_id, VK_KHR_present_id2 on HoneyKrisp
– VK_KHR_present_wait, VK_KHR_present_wait2 on HoneyKrisp
– VK_KHR_maintenance10 on ANV, NVK, RADV
– VK_EXT_shader_uniform_buffer_unsized_array on ANV, HK, NVK, RADV
– VK_EXT_device_memory_report on panvk
– VK_VALVE_video_encode_rgb_conversion on radv
– VK_EXT_custom_resolve on RADV
– GL_EXT_shader_pixel_local_storage on Panfrost v6+
– VK_EXT_image_drm_format_modifier on panvk/v7
– VK_KHR_sampler_ycbcr_conversion on panvk/v7
– sparseResidencyImage2D on panvk v10+
– sparseResidencyStandard2DBlockShape on panvk v10+
– VK_KHR_surface_maintenance1 promotion everywhere EXT is exposed (anv, hk, lvp, nvk, radv, tu, v3dv, vn)
– VK_KHR_swapchain_maintenance1 promotion everywhere EXT is exposed (anv, hk, lvp, nvk, radv, tu, v3dv, vn)
– VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering on PowerVR
– VK_EXT_multisampled_render_to_single_sampled on panvk
– VK_KHR_pipeline_binary on HoneyKrisp
– VK_KHR_incremental_present on pvr
– VK_KHR_xcb_surface on pvr
– VK_KHR_xlib_surface on pvr
– VK_KHR_robustness2 promotion everywhere EXT is exposed (panvk v10+, HoneyKrisp, hasvk, NVK, Turnip, lavapipe, venus)
Downloads and more details on today’s Mesa 26.0 release, which comes just days after the Linux 6.19 stable kernel, can be found via the Mesa release announcement. Fresh Mesa graphics driver benchmarks coming up on Phoronix soon.
