Mesa 23.2 Stable Released For Improved Open-Source Vulkan & OpenGL Drivers

After being delayed by many weeks, Mesa 23.2 has been released as the quarterly feature release for this collection of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers used by AMD Radeon, Intel graphics, Apple Silicon, Qualcomm Adreno (Freedreno), Nouveau (open-source NVIDIA), Broadcom / Raspberry Pi, Arm Mali and other hardware.

Mesa 23.2.1 is out today as the first stable release in the Mesa 23.2 series — an accidental tagging of Mesa 23.2 weeks earlier led to this first stable version taking the Mesa 23.2.1 tag rather than the first point release. Mesa 23.2.1 is out now so hopefully it will still manage to make it into the autumn round of Linux distribution releases. Mesa 23.2 delivers plenty of exciting changes with RADV ray-tracing being enabled by default for all AMD RDNA2/RDNA3 graphics processors, the Rusticl OpenCL implementation is much more capable, Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan landed plenty of improvements, BLAKE3 shader hashing, some improvements to the older R300 and R600 drivers, the Asahi AGX Gallium3D driver now supports OpenCL 3.1 and OpenGL ES 3.0, Lavapipe added task/mesh shader support along with other new features, Intel Vulkan H.265 video decoding support, Intel’s Vulkan driver has enabled GPL support by default, and there are various performance optimizations within the key drivers. Mesa 23.2 also has enabled support for various routine Vulkan extensions introduced like VK_EXT_dynamic_rendering_unused_attachments and VK_EXT_attachment_feedback_loop_dynamic_state on RADV along with VK_EXT_depth_bias_control and VK_EXT_pipeline_robustness and other extensions to help Linux gamers.

Mesa 23.2.1 can be downloaded from the FreeDesktop.org GitLab for those compiling these open-source graphics drivers from sources.

Due to this release being quickly thrown together after 23.2-rc4, the Mesa 23.2.2 point release will likely come next week to incorporate more of the back-ported fixes from Mesa Git that didn’t make it in time for today’s release.

Mesa 23.3 as the Q4 feature release will already be branching later in August — a week later now due to XDC 2023 as well as this delayed Mesa 23.2 cycle — and will hopefully be out as stable in November.