Mesa 26.0 Launch: Free OpenGL & Vulkan Released

After three months of development, the release of a free implementation of the OpenGL and Vulkan API, Mesa 26.0.0, has been presented. The initial release of the Mesa 26.0.0 branch is considered experimental, with plans to release a stable version 26.0.1 after final code stabilization.

Mesa 26.0 includes support for the Vulkan 1.4 graphics API in various drivers for different GPUs. ANV drivers are for Intel GPUs, RADV for AMD GPUs, NVK for NVIDIA GPUs, HoneyKrisp (hk) for Apple GPUs, Turnip for Qualcomm GPUs, PanVK for ARM Mali GPU, lavapipe software rasterizer (lvp) and in emulator mode (vn). Other drivers like v3dv (Broadcom VideoCore GPU for Raspberry Pi 4+) and dzn support Vulkan 1.0, kk driver for Vulkan 1.1, and pvr driver for Vulkan 1.2.

Additionally, full support for OpenGL 4.6 is provided by drivers such as iris (Intel GPU Gen 8+), radeonsi (AMD), Crocus (old Intel Gen4-Gen7 GPU), AMD (r600), zink, llvmpipe, virgl (Virtual GPU Virgil3D for QEMU/KVM), freedreno (Qualcomm Adreno), d3d12 (a layer for organizing OpenGL work on DirectX 12), and asahi (AGX GPU in Apple M1 and M2 chips). Other OpenGL versions are also supported by different drivers.

Some of the key innovations in this release include the RadeonSI driver switching to use NIR shaders and the ACO shader compilation backend, which significantly enhances shader compilation speed and optimization. The introduction of the KosmicKrisp Vulkan driver for macOS and the significant improvement in ray tracing performance in the RADV Vulkan driver are notable updates.