Mesa 19.3 Has The Very Preliminary OpenGL + Vulkan Driver Support Ready For Intel Gen12

Similar to the flurry of Radeon driver activity in buttoning things up ahead of the Mesa 19.3 feature freeze, the Intel open-source crew has landed some last-minute bits around the Tiger Lake "Gen 12" enablement.

In recent months there has been a lot of Intel Tiger Lake / Gen12 Linux enablement activity. On the kernel side Linux 5.4 has the initial bits to be evolved over the coming cycles. Meanwhile over in user-space the initial "Iris" OpenGL and "ANV" Vulkan driver support is in place for Mesa 19.3.

Mesa 19.3-RC1 Released With OpenGL 4.6 For Intel, Many Vulkan Driver Improvements

Mesa 19.3 feature development is now officially over and Mesa 20.0 is open for development on Git master. This final Mesa series of 2019 comes with many exciting OpenGL and Vulkan drivers.

One of the key improvements with Mesa 19.3 is that Intel's OpenGL i965/Iris drivers now supports OpenGL 4.6! Thanks to the SPIR-V ingestion support finally landing, the Intel open-source Linux graphics driver finally has OpenGL 4.6 capabilities in full. AMD has also been working towards RadeonSI OpenGL 4.6 support but with that also transitioning them to NIR it's been a long-time coming and hasn't materialized for Mesa's final 2019 release.

mesa 19.3.0-rc1

Hi List,

I'd like to announce the availability of 19.3.0-rc1 and the beginning of the
19.3.0 release cycle. Despite the short release cycle we've got plenty of good
things in store for you. Among them the OpenGL 4.6, initial Intel gen12 support,
lots of new Vulkan extensions, and meson support for windows.

Expect a new RC each Wednesday for the next few weeks until the release tracker
is cleared. You can see the tracker here:
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/milestones/5. Please be sure to add
any issues to that tracker that block the release.

Dylan


New Features
============

GL_ARB_gl_spirv on i965, iris.
GL_ARB_spirv_extensions on i965, iris.
GL_EXT_demote_to_helper_invocation on iris, i965.
OpenGL 4.6 on i965, iris.
EGL_EXT_image_flush_external
VK_ANDROID_external_memory_android_hardware_buffer on RADV.
VK_KHR_shader_clock on Intel, RADV.
VK_KHR_shader_float_controls on Intel, RADV.
VK_KHR_spirv_1_4 on Intel, RADV.
VK_KHR_timeline_semaphore on RADV.
VK_KHR_vulkan_memory_model on Intel.
VK_EXT_shader_subgroup_ballot on Intel.
VK_EXT_shader_subgroup_vote on Intel.
VK_EXT_texel_buffer_alignment on RADV.
VK_INTEL_performance_query on Intel.
Meson support for windows using MSVC and MinGW
scons has been deprecated for non windows
Initial Intel gen12 (Tigerlake) support on anvil and iris


git tag: mesa-19.3.0-rc1

Radeon Open-Source Linux Graphics Have A Wild Day For Mesa 19.3 From 8K Decode To ACO

With Mesa 19.3 scheduled to be branched today and that marking the end of feature development for this next quarterly installment to these open-source Linux OpenGL/Vulkan drivers, developers are in a mad rush landing last minute improvements. The open-source Radeon driver support has a lot to stand in particular from today's work.

A Lot More Intel Tiger Lake / Gen12 Xe Graphics Code Merged To Mesa 19.3

With Mesa 19.3 embarking on its feature freeze this week unless the period is extended, Intel developers have been working on landing more of their Gen12 graphics code into this release for future Tiger Lake CPUs as well as the basis for their first Xe discrete graphics card.

For Mesa 19.3 is a lot of Intel's Gen13 graphics code bring-up to go along with their changes coming for Linux 5.5. For both kernel and user-space, it will likely be a few more releases each before the Gen12 graphics support is squared away, which should be fine since the first Xe graphics card isn't expected until H2'2020 and the same goes for the Tiger Lake CPUs with Gen12 graphics.

Mesa 19.3 Adds Support For New AMDGPU Reset Interface

AMD open-source developer Marek Olšák is landing the last of his changes for the Mesa 19.3 imminent feature freeze.

Among the changes merged overnight were for initializing shader compilers in threads on-demand as what appears to mostly benefit Piglit when spinning up its many shaders for testing. Mesa 19.3 has also updated the AMDGPU winsys code to support the new AMDGPU reset interface plumbed through the kernel and Mesa DRM library (libdrm).

NVIDIA Announces GeForce GTX 1650 SUPER + GTX 1660 SUPER

After weeks of information leaking on these new ~$200 GTX SUPER graphics cards, NVIDIA today officially announced the GTX 1660 SUPER that is shipping today and the GTX 1650 SUPER that will hit store shelves in late November.

The NVIDIA GTX 1660 SUPER is being marketed as 1.5x faster than the GeForce GTX 1060 for popular Windows games. The GTX 1660 SUPER features 15 Gbps GDDR6 video memory and the Turing upgrade over Pascal provides a significant performance uplift. The GTX 1660 SUPER will begin shipping today starting at $229 USD.

NVIDIA Launches Upgraded Shield TV with Tegra X1+ Processor

Ubuntu's Mir Working On Replaceable Renderer, Hybrid Graphics Driver Support

Canonical's Chris Halse Rogers has shared a road-map for Mir (or terrain map as he prefers calling it) about their future plans for this open-source display server that remains focused now on providing Wayland support. 

Zink Merged Into Mesa 19.3 For Offering OpenGL Over Vulkan

Zink is the effort led by Collabora's Erik Faye-Lund for offering a generic OpenGL/GLES implementation that runs atop Vulkan. While it's exciting prospects and well into the future could allow hardware vendors to avoid having to maintain OpenGL drivers with instead focusing on Vulkan, for now there is still a long road ahead for performance and features. Right now Zink supports just OpenGL 2.1 / OpenGL ES 2.0. With time though there are plans for supporting OpenGL 3.x/4.x and OpenGL ES 3.x functionality. At least with Zink, the existing OpenGL code inside Mesa/Gallium3D is doing much of the heavy lifting. 

D9VK 0.30 Released With Performance Improvements, Other D3D9 Features Now Supported

Building off yesterday's DXVK 1.4.4 release, D9VK 0.30 is out as the similar project that implements the Direct3D 9 API atop Vulkan.

D9VK 0.30 re-bases its code atop DXCVK 1.4.4 and has performance improvements via locking changes, avoiding the throwing out of D3DUSAGE_DYNAMIC buffers, supporting discard on non-dynamic resources, other locking changes, and other work.

D3D11 and D3D10 to Vulkan layer DXVK version 1.4.4 is out

One missed from the weekend, developer Philip Rebohle released a fresh update to the Vulkan layer DXVK with version 1.4.4.

A small and sweet maintenance release we have here with a couple of optimizations. The memory footprint of small and frequently updated buffers was reduced, there's some minor optimizations for "Stream Output and Append/Consume buffers (used e.g. by Unity Engine)", a bug fixed from DXVK 1.4.3 that caused some invalid state cache entries being generated, some Vulkan validation errors with geometry shaders were fixed and some "potential read-after-write hazards involving vertex and index buffers" were also solved.

DXVK 1.4.4 With Vulkan Usage Fixes, Optimizations & A Few Game Specific Fixes

Philip Rebohle has released his latest weekly update to DXVK for accelerating Direct3D 10/11 games using Vulkan as a big boost for Steam Play (Proton) and Wine.

DXVK 1.4.4 has a regression fix for 1.4.3 that could lead to invalid Vulkan API usage, Vulkan validation error fixes, potential read-after-write hazards resolved, optimizations for Stream Output and Append/Consume buffers, and reduced memory footprint for small and frequently updated buffers.