The open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers making up Mesa had another very successful year. Even with all the years being invested into Mesa largely by Intel, AMD, Valve, Red Hat, and others, the upward trajectory continues for Mesa on expanding the hardware support, punctually adding new Vulkan extensions, and racking up other wins.
This year when Valve announced the much anticipated Steam Frame VR headset, we found out that the Adreno TURNIP driver is even going to be used by default as the biggest win to date for that less talked about driver. In 2025 the big investments into the Radeon graphics support continued by both Valve and AMD. There was also the win of AMD abandoning their AMDVLK driver and proprietary OpenGL/Vulkan/media in the Radeon Software package in favor of Mesa. The open-source NVIDIA “NVK” Vulkan driver has also been taking shape this year with a lot more functionality and better performance in place. Microsoft has also continued contributing to Mesa for benefiting WSL uses.
Plus Rusticl has become much more capable this year for this modern Rust-based OpenCL driver. Zink for generic OpenGL over Vulkan also has worked itself into very reliable and performant shape. Intel engineers have also been busy preparing their Xe3 and Xe3P graphics support in their ANV and Iris drivers for upcoming hardware.
In reliving the top Mesa moments covered on Phoronix in 2025, below is a look back at the most-viewed stories for the many great accomplishments.
Steam Frame Using Mesa’s Turnip Vulkan Open-Source Driver
In addition to Valve contributing to the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver for enhancing the Linux gaming experience and their AMD-powered Steam Deck, the upcoming Steam Frame VR headset is making use of Mesa’s open-source “Turnip” Vulkan driver for Qualcomm Adreno graphics.
More AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 Improvements Land For Open-Source Driver
It’s a very busy week for the open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers leading up to the Mesa 25.2 code branching. On top of RADV ray-tracing improvements, Vulkan 1.2 conformance for Kepler GPUs, Xe3 Panther Lake graphics enabled by default, and many other last minute changes, over the past week has also been a push getting more AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 “FSR 4” improvements merged for the Radeon RADV driver.
Mesa 25.3-rc4 Brings Fix For Many Steam Play Games To Properly Run On Intel Linux Driver
Mesa 25.3-rc4 is available for testing as the latest weekly candidate as we work toward the Mesa 25.3 stable release this month.
Mesa 25.3 Released With Many Open-Source Vulkan Driver Improvements
Mesa 25.3 is out tonight as the newest quarterly feature release to this set of (predominantly) OpenGL and Vulkan drivers widely used across Linux systems. Mesa 25.3 features numerous Vulkan extensions added to the different open-source drivers, continued enhancements to the OpenGL drivers, and various other changes.
Mesa 25.2.6 Released With Many Driver Fixes
Eric Engestrom just released Mesa 25.2.6 as the newest bi-weekly stable update to this collection of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers widely used on Linux systems for 3D support.
CachyOS July 2025 Ships With Mesa Patched For Anti-Lag, Plasma Defaulting To Wayland
The popular Arch Linux based CachyOS operating system is out with its “July 2025” update for providing the latest innovations for this performance-optimized, feature-rich Linux distribution.
Mesa 25.3 Merges Vulkan AMD Anti-Lag Support
An exciting addition landing into the Mesa 25.3 codebase today is support for AMD’s Vulkan anti-lag extension, VK_AMD_anti_lag.
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 Drops VDPAU Video Acceleration In Favor Of VA-API
Mesa’s Gallium3D video acceleration code has long supported both the VA-API and VDPAU interfaces for video acceleration. VA-API has enjoyed more widespread support among Linux applications and typically more robust while the Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU) was the interface originally started by NVIDIA for their official Linux driver. As of today, Mesa has now removed support for VDPAU acceleration.
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 Zink Driver Achieves Hits Major Milestone For Workstation Graphics
Mike Blumenkrantz of Valve’s Linux graphics team is the one who has been driving the development forward on Mesa’s Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver. While traditionally focused on getting OpenGL games running over Zink, recently he has taken to optimizing Zink for workstation graphics.
Mesa 25.1 Released With Many Open-Source Vulkan Driver Improvements
Mesa 25.1 is out today as the new quarterly feature release for this set of open-source user-space graphics drivers primarily consisting of OpenGL and Vulkan driver support on Linux systems.
Mesa 26.0 Bringing Support For 64K x 64K Textures With AMD RDNA4 GPUs
The latest improvement to the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver by prominent AMD Mesa developer Marek Olšák is enabling support for up to 64K x 64K textures with RDNA4 GPUs.
Microsoft Lands 62k Lines Of Code Patch In Mesa: Adds New “MFT” Gallium3D Frontend
Microsoft’s open-source code contributions to the Mesa 3D graphics stack continues… Hitting Mesa 25.2-devel today was a patch adding 61,925 lines of code patch as they introduce a new Gallium3D front-end.
Valve Developer Gets Initial DLSS Support Working On Open-Source NVIDIA “NVK” Driver
Autumn Ashton of Valve’s Linux graphics driver team and responsible for many great Mesa and DXVK/VKD3D-Proton improvements over the years has managed an exciting new feat: getting NVIDIA DLSS upscaling working atop Mesa’s NVK open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver. The code isn’t ready to be merged yet but is an exciting early milestone.
Mesa 25.3 Lands More Changes To Prepare For OpenGL Mesh Shaders
Being worked on for a number of months now is GL_EXT_mesh_shader as an extension for bringing mesh shaders to OpenGL. This is an alternative to NVIDIA’s GL_NV_mesh_shader extension being worked on for Mesa drivers and in particular the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.
Newer Arm Mali GPUs Now Advertising Vulkan 1.2 Support With Mesa’s PanVK Driver
Following recent Vulkan 1.1 support within Mesa for the PanVK driver for open-source Arm Mali Vulkan driver support, Vulkan 1.2 is now being advertised.
Mesa 25.2 RADV Driver Merges Support For AV1 Vulkan Video Encode
Published last November as part of Vulkan 1.3.302 was the VK_KHR_video_encode_av1 extension for adding AV1 video encoding to the Vulkan Video API. Ahead of next quarter’s Mesa 25.2 release, the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver “RADV” has merged its AV1 encode support.
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.
AMD RadeonSI Driver Now Defaults To Enabling ACO For Faster Performance
Prominent AMD Radeon Gallium3D driver developer Marek Olšák just changed the RadeonSI driver’s default from the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end over to the ACO back-end initially developed by Valve. This should lead to better performance and quicker shader compilation and in turn faster game loads.
CLUDA Posted For Mesa: Gallium3D API Implemented Atop NVIDIA CUDA Driver API
Well, here is a weekend surprise… Red Hat engineer and Rusticl lead developer Karol Herbst has opened a Mesa merge request for “CLUDA” as a compute-only driver that implements the Gallium3D API atop the NVIDIA CUDA driver API. Wow.
Imagination PowerVR Mesa Vulkan Driver Enables Unofficial Support For More GPUs
Merged today for the Mesa 25.3 graphics driver code is enabling support for more PowerVR Imagination GPUs within the “PVR” Vulkan driver albeit not officially supported nor in active development. Your mileage may vary but for some users with certain GPUs may work out well enough.
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.
Mike Blumenkrantz Axes Old Mesa Code: Goodbye Gallium Nine
While there was the big 62k lines of code patch from Microsoft merged yesterday to Mesa, separately there was also some code cleaning to remove some previously-deprecated code from the codebase.
Mesa Adds Contributor Guidelines – Will Allow AI Generated Code If Author Understands It
Merged to Mesa Git are new contributor guidelines added to the documentation. This can help new users in submitting patches to Mesa. It also lays out a policy of allowing AI-generated/assisted code but the author submitting the code must be able to understand the code in question and take responsibility for it.
Mesa NVK Lands Support For VK_NVX_image_view_handle – Needed For NVIDIA DLSS
Just days ago Valve developer Autumn Ashton announced initial NVIDIA DLSS upscaling for the open-source Mesa NVK driver. One of those needed Vulkan extensions, VK_NVX_image_view_handle, is already merged to Mesa Git.
Google Continues Working On “Magma” For Mesa Cross-Platform System Call Interface
Mesa 25.2 entered its feature freeze yesterday with many exciting driver improvements with new features and performance optimizations while one feature that wasn’t ready for merging in this quarter’s release is Magma, which is a recent effort by Google engineers working on a cross-platform system call interface for Mesa. And it’s written in Rust.
Intel’s Vulkan Linux Driver Adds Memory Pool Support For Some Massive Performance Gains
Merged a few minutes ago to the Mesa 25.2-devel graphics driver code for the open-source Intel “ANV” Vulkan Linux driver is proper memory pool support. In turn this can deliver some magnificent performance improvements on the likes of Lunar Lake and other newer Intel graphics processors.
RADV Ray-Tracing Lands Pointer Flags Support For RDNA3 & Newer
The RADV Vulkan driver’s ray-tracing performance has improved a lot over time such as shown within yesterday’s RADV vs. AMDVLK performance comparison on Strix Point. Coincidentally, merged today is yet another ray-tracing optimization to benefit RDNA3 (GFX11) and newer AMD graphics processors.
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.
