Mesa 12.0 Released With OpenGL 4.3 Support, Intel Vulkan and More (phoronix.com) 24
An anonymous reader writes: Mesa3D developers have announced the release of Mesa 12.0. Mesa 12 notably adds open-source OpenGL 4.3 drivers for Intel, Radeon, and NVIDIA on Linux, and it also integrates the previously open-sourced Intel Vulkan graphics API driver. From the Phoronix analysis, "Mesa 12.0 is easily one of the biggest updates to this important open-source user-space OpenGL driver stack in quite some time and will offer much better support and features especially for Intel, Radeon, and NVIDIA open-source Linux desktop users/gamers." You can download Mesa 3D Graphics Library 12.0.0 here.
Intel Vulkan (Score:1)
WTF is Intel Vulkan? Is it anything like Vulkan?
And Radeon is the brand, not the company. The company is AMD.
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WTF is Intel Vulkan? Is it anything like Vulkan?
Well the Vulkan API is developed by Khronos+++.
There's the generic Vulkan changes to Mesa by Intel.
And there's the Vulkan driver for Intel chips by Intel.
The post refers to the latter two, they're both implementations with the first part making the API available to Mesa client. The other part makes sure it's actually accelerated on Intel chips.
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And Radeon is the brand, not the company. The company is AMD.
So? Maybe the new drivers only support Radeon cards.
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Doubt they only support Radeon cards and support every nVidia card and every one of Intel's embedded GPUs.
I'm just asking for a little consistency here.
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The Radeon driver does indeed support more than just Radeon. However, historically it was written specifically for Radeon. There is another driver for other AMD devices (the name of which escapes me). Slowly, over time, the Radeon driver has assumed more and more responsibility for other devices so now you use the "Radeon" driver for almost all AMD devices. However, this transition occurred over a period of at least 10 years. Changing the name of the driver now would be incredibly confusing.
The average
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WTF is Intel Vulkan? Is it anything like Vulkan?
It's the driver implementation of the Vulkan API for Intel chipsets. (Odd that this would need to be explained.)
And Radeon is the brand, not the company. The company is AMD.
Radeon in this context is the name of the open source driver for AMD's chipsets.
Summary is kind of confusing (Score:3)
At first I was scratching my head because I know for a fact Intel didn't create Vulkan, at least not on its own. It seems what actually happened is that a while back Intel added Vulkan API support [intel.com] to its open source driver for its own graphics chips, and that is what has been integrated into Mesa.
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Yeah, the summary makes no sense at all. IMHO the most important change here is Intel support for OpenGL 4.3 (up from 3.3). For casual gamers (those likely to be using Mesa and integrated Intel cards), this will open up a whole new world. As stated in the article, the promise to get up to 4.5 for the next release is most welcome.
I'll be honest that I don't really know what impact mainlining the Vulcan drivers for Intel will have in the short term. Is anyone using Vulcan? Possibly it's just me, but with
Re: Summary is kind of confusing (Score:1)
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Not True. Galatians 5. There is no law christians MUST follow accept for accepting Jesus Christ as your lord an saviour.
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I've lived in Sweden for some years, and I've never seen horsemeat for sale in any of the shops here. OTOH, it's not at all difficult to get reindeer.
softpedia? (Score:2)
Who would download anything from softpedia, esp open source? Why not get from mesa3d.org?
ftp://ftp.freedesktop.org/pub/... [freedesktop.org]
Obligatory question... (Score:2)
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Does it run on 3Dfx Voodoo 2 cards?
I don't think Vulcans practice Voodoo?
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Does it run on 3Dfx Voodoo 2 cards?
No but with Vulkan you are able to implement the Glide API that is used by 3Dfx Voodoo cards. So, in theory you can natively use old games that are designed for cards.
An open source graphics card is now feasible! (Score:2)
It used to be a monumental task to create an open source graphics card because of the sheer size of an ever evolving graphics API that had to be implemented, debugged and maintained. However, now with Vulkan as a common base to graphics related APIs, the requirements for an open source graphics cards are only to implement the Vulkan API. It's really the ideal time to make an open source graphics card.