Mesa 20.1.6 Released with World War Z Fixes, More RADV Vulkan Improvements

Mesa 19.3.3 released

The bi-weekly release cycle of the latest Mesa 20.1 open source graphics stack for the Linux desktop continues with Mesa 20.1.6, the latest stable Vulkan/OpenGL graphics drivers update.

As with all point releases, Mesa 20.1.6 is here to add yet another layer of bug fixes in an attempt to further improve the overall performance, stability and reliability of the included graphics drivers for AMD Radeon and Intel graphics.

Once again, it looks like the Mesa development team concentrated their efforts to improve the RADV Vulkan driver for AMD Radeon graphics cards. For example, Mesa 20.1.6 improves support for the World War Z third-person shooter in the RADV driver by overriding the uniform buffer offset alignment.

Also for the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver, Mesa 20.1.6 fixes handling of attribs 16-31, replaces setter with getter for extracting values, no longer considers layouts as fast-clearable on compute queue, and redos the layout based on the metadata when importing an image.

For GFX10/Navi hardware, Mesa 20.1.6 now prevents a GPU hang by limiting LATE_ALLOC_GS and adds missing initialization of registers in the RADV Vulkan driver. Also, the right wave size in gfx10_ngg_calculate_subgroup_info is now used in the RadeonSI OpenGL driver.

The ANV Intel Vulkan driver has been improved as well in this release. The driver now advertises the shaderIntegerFunctions2 extension, features better handling of realloc failures, and unifies inputs_read and outputs_written between geometry stages.

Some performance improvements are also in place for the Intel i965 OpenGL driver in Mesa 20.1.6, which turns off multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) completely in the Etnaviv graphics driver for Vivante GPUs.

The Gallium LLVMpipe, Panfrost, and NV50 drivers received various minor fixes. You can check out the release announcement for more details on these fixes and to download the Mesa 20.1.6 source tarball.

If you rely on the Mesa graphics stack for all your 3D graphics and gaming needs, you should update to this latest version as soon as possible after it arrives in the stable software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution.

The next point release, Mesa 20.1.7, is expected on September 2nd.

Last updated 4 years ago

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