Mesa 10.2 Improves Linux's Open-Source Graphics Drivers

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."

Re:Still relevant nowadays?

[rroman]

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.

Re: capable of achieving

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been following Mesa's development for some time while working on some cross-platform 3D graphics stuff.

Right now Mesa's OpenGL implementation for Intel HD Graphics 4000+ is probably more complete than the Windows driver's. This isn't exactly a trivial accomplishment. A working OpenGL 3.3 implementation is more than what Apple offered for a long time.

Some GL features are obviously not as well optimized in Mesa, but many of them are so bad they're at least "considered harmful" anyway. And with 10.2 we got gems like ARB_buffer_storage, which basically removes the API overhead from accessing the GPU's memory. No more unpredictable stalls while writing data!