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Mesa 10.2 Improves Linux's Open-Source Graphics Drivers

Posted by Soulskill on from the onward-and-upward dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Mesa 10.2 was introduced this week as the new shining example of what open source graphics (and open source projects in general) are capable of achieving. The latest release of this often underrepresented open source graphics driver project has many new OpenGL and driver features including a number of new OpenGL 4 extensions. The reverse-engineered Freedreno driver now poses serious competition to Qualcomm's Adreno driver, an OpenMAX implementation was added for Radeon video encoding support, Intel Broadwell support now works better, the software rasterizer supports OpenGL 3.3, and many other changes are present."

3 of 58 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Still relevant nowadays? by rroman · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I think that Mesa is necessary. I'm developing UI in QtQuick2 and it does only work with OpenGL 2 and above. Since there are platforms that don't support OpenGL 2 I have to have fallback to software rendered graphic. Mesa saves the day. If there was no Mesa, I'd be forced not to use QtQuick2 and stick to Qt widgets, which are not really designed to run well on mobile devices. And for the record, I do think, that QtQuick2 is the future of Gui development.

  2. Re: capable of achieving by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That's fine, they don't really sell new games anymore. They sell subscriptions to services that resemble games.

  3. Relevent unless you are using binary drivers by Sits · · Score: 5, Informative

    Unless your graphics driver provides a full 3D stack (userspace GL libraries down to kernel drivers) you will be using Mesa on Linux. You are probably thinking of Mesa as purely a software renderer whereas it is also used as a frontend to open source 3D drivers and uses DRI to provide access to the hardware's acceleration.

    I've yet to see binary any drivers use Mesa.