Mesa 21.3 Graphics Stack Is Here with Zink, RADV, and Panfrost Improvements

Mesa 21.3

Eric Engestrom announced today the release and general availability of Mesa 21.3 as the third major update to the latest and greatest Mesa 21 open-source graphics stack series for GNU/Linux distributions.

Mesa 21.3 is here three and a half months after Mesa 21.2 to further improve Linux’s number one graphics stack. It brings many great improvements, starting with official OpenGL ES 3.1 compliance for Collabora’s Panfrost driver, threaded shader compilation for the Iris driver, OpenGL ES 3.2 support for the Zink driver, and support for AV1 videos for the Video Acceleration API (VA-API ).

In addition, Mesa 21.3 introduces experimental ray tracing support to the Radeon Vulkan (RADV) driver, Vulkan 1.2 support, new extensions, and anisotropic texture filtering to the Lavapipe driver, as well as OpenGL 4.5 and OpenGL FP16 support to the LLVMpipe driver, which is now up to three times faster for 2D workloads.

Newly supported Vulkan extensions by Lavapipe include VK_EXT_color_write_enable, VK_KHR_timeline_semaphore, VK_EXT_external_memory_host, VK_KHR_depth_stencil_resolve, VK_KHR_shader_float16_int8, VK_KHR_shader_subgroup_extended_types on lavapipe, VK_EXT_primitive_topology_list_restart, and VK_KHR_spirv_1_4.

LLVMpipe now supports the GL_ARB_texture_filter_anisotropic and GL_AMD_pinned_memory OpenGL extensions, and the RADV driver now supports the VK_EXT_shader_atomic_float2, VK_EXT_vertex_input_dynamic_state, VK_EXT_primitive_topology_list_restart, VK_KHR_shader_integer_dot_product, VK_KHR_maintenance4, and VK_KHR_format_feature_flags2 Vulkan extensions.

On top of that, Mesa 21.3 adds a workaround for various games and support for the EGL_EXT_present_opaque extension on Wayland, enables the NGG shader based culling by default for GFX10.3 on RADV, and adds support for the VK_EXT_shader_atomic_float2 and VK_KHR_synchronization2 Vulkan extensions to the Intel ANV Vulkan driver.

Of course, Mesa 21.3 also fixes numerous bugs to make your Linux gaming experience better. It improves support for the Tomb Raider, Euro Truck Simulator 2, DOOM Eternal, Doom 3, Genshin Impact, Resident Evil: Village, Resident Evil 2, Unreal Tournament, Cathedral, Aliens: Fireteam Elite, Dota 2, Final Fantasy V, Monster Hunter Rise Demo, Valheim, World War Z: Aftermath, Assault Android Cactus, and Splitgate games.

Last but not least, it fixes a Wayland crash with the Mozilla Firefox web browser, a crash in the KDE Plasma desktop environment that occurred after closing the “splash screen” downloader, a crash in Godot games when the Steam overlay is enabled, and improves support for the OnePlus 8 Android smartphone.

Mesa 21.3 is available for download right now from the official website, but as with all new major updates the first release is tagged as a development release, which means that you should wait for the first point release in the new series, Mesa 21.3.1, if you’re concerned about stability and reliability.

Last updated 2 years ago

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