The first quarter of 2025 is already drawing to a close… It seemed like Q1’2025 flew by but when looking back at all the Mesa 3D graphics driver activity, there was a heck of a lot accomplished in this area of the open-source landscape. Open-source Vulkan drivers continued advancing feverishly, Mesa code continues to be adapted to new platforms from Windows to Haiku OS, and all the big vendors continue being involved in open-source GPU drivers in one form or another.
In case you missed any of the interesting daily news on Phoronix during Q1’2025, here’s a look back at the top twenty most popular Mesa stories during this quarter:
NVIDIA’s Open-Source Kernel Driver Ported To Haiku OS, Mesa NVK Adapted To Run On Top
Haiku OS developer X512 has managed a rather impressive feat: porting NVIDIA’s open-source kernel modules to Haiku. Not only did he get NVIDIA’s official Linux kernel modules running on Haiku but he also ported the Mesa NVK Vulkan driver to be able to run atop the NVIDIA kernel driver interface.
Mesa 25.0 Released With Vulkan 1.4 Driver Support, AMD RDNA4 Ready
Mesa 25.0 was officially released today as the newest quarterly feature release for this set of open-source OpenGL, OpenCL, Vulkan, and video acceleration drivers used on Linux systems by multiple hardware vendors.
Mesa’s Venus Driver Adds Vulkan Ray-Tracing Support For VMs
Mesa’s Venus driver that allows for 3D graphics acceleration within virtual machines is now able to the Vulkan ray-tracing extensions when using Mesa 25.1-devel along with updated Venus Protocol and Virglrenderer code.
Asahi Linux’s Honeykrisp Vulkan Driver Gains Sparse Support In Mesa 25.1
Alyssa Rosenzweig has carried out a fresh sync of the Asahi Linux AGX Gallium3D and Honeykrisp Vulkan driver changes of the work that was being carried by the Asahi Linux development tree and now upstreamed to Mesa proper.
Rusticl Wins: Mesa Officially Deprecates Clover OpenCL
With today’s Mesa 25.1-devel Git code, the “Clover” OpenCL Gallium3D state tracker is officially deprecated. Clover will be eventually removed with the Rust-written Rusticl OpenCL driver being modern, much more actively maintained, and all-around a better option than the aging Clover code.
Rusticl OpenCL Driver Nearing Cross-Vendor Shared Virtual Memory Support
Red Hat engineer Karol Herbst who continues persevering with the Rusticl Rust-based OpenCL driver for Mesa has an exciting late Christmas present on the way… He’s been hacking on Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support for Rusticl that works across GPU vendor drivers/hardware.
Mesa 25.0 Gets A New Vulkan Layer For Limiting The Amount Of Reported vRAM
A half-year-old merge request from Igalia’s Karmjit Mahil has been merged for Mesa 25.0 that is a Vulkan layer allowing for optionally limiting the amount of video memory reported to games/applications.
Mesa 25.0 Is Trending Well For Release This Month
Mesa 25.0-rc2 was released yesterday and it’s rather boring on the changes, but that’s a good thing during this bug fixing phase.
Mesa 25.0.2 Changes Range From Fixing Soft FP64 For Old AMD GPUs To RX 9070 Fixes
Even amid the ongoing FreeDesktop.org GitLab cloud/server migration, Eric Engestrom has managed to release Mesa 25.0.2 on schedule as the newest stable release for these open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers for Linux systems.
Mesa 25.0-rc1 Released With Initial AMD RDNA4 Support, Vulkan 1.4 & Other New Extensions
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.
Blumenkrantz Boosts Zink Performance By 150% For Everspace, Possibly Helping Other Games
Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve’s Linux graphics driver team who is known for his work on the Zink generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver implementation has made another mighty round of improvements for helping the gaming performance.
Mesa 25.0-rc3 Released With Numerous RADV & RadeonSI Fixes
Mesa 25.0-rc3 is out today as a rather large weekly release candidate to Mesa 25.0 that will be debuting as stable later this month.
Mesa’s Lavapipe Driver Now Exposes Vulkan 1.4
In time for the upcoming release of Mesa 25.0, Mesa’s Lavapipe software Vulkan API implementation is now the latest driver exposing Vulkan 1.4 support.
Mesa RADV/RadeonSI Now Support RDNA4 GPUs With Radeon GPU Profiler
Landing in Mesa 25.1 today for the RADV Vulkan and RadeonSI OpenGL drivers is Radeon GPU Profiler “RGP” integration for RDNA4/GFX12 GPUs with the newly-launched Radeon RX 9070 series.
Mesa’s Venus Now Exposes Vulkan 1.4 Support
The Mesa Venus driver code for use with VirtIO-GPU for exposing accelerated Vulkan API support within virtualized environments (VMs) now is advertising Vulkan 1.4 API support.
RADV Vulkan Video Adds Low Latency Encoding Support
Adding to the Vulkan Video support for Mesa’s Radeon “RADV” Vulkan driver is honoring of the low latency encoding options.
RADV Vulkan Driver Support Being Worked On For The GPU Found In The Sony PS5 & BC-250
Open-source developers are working on allowing the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver to support the “Cyan Skillfish” graphics processor IP found within the Sony PlayStation 5 APU as well as the AMD BC-250 mining cards.
New Round Of Driver Optimizations For AMD RadeonSI In Mesa 25.1
Well known AMD Mesa driver developer Marek Olšák has been at it again working on some further performance optimizations to the open-source RadeonSI Gallium3D driver code.
Microsoft Lands Direct3D 12 Video Encode Improvements For HEVC In Mesa 25.1
While having missed the mark last week for making it into this quarter’s Mesa 25.0 release, merged for Q2’s Mesa 25.1 release by Microsoft engineers are some enhancements to the Direct3D 12 video encode capabilities.
Cross-Vendor Mesh Shading Being Worked On For OpenGL
While it’s very rare in recent times for a new OpenGL extension — especially one that is exciting — given the continued great adoption of the modern Vulkan API, in 2025 we are looking at an interesting addition to OpenGL with cross-vendor mesh shading via a proposed GL_EXT_mesh_shader implementation.
