A few days ago it was announced that Mesa 25.0 experimental release, which corresponds to the first version of this new branch and according to the development model this experimental version will be stabilized in the final version 25.0.1.
With this release, Mesa 25.0 Introduces support for the Vulkan 1.4 API in various drivers graphics, ranging from Intel’s ANV and AMD’s RADV to NVIDIA’s NVK. On the other hand, some drivers such as PanVK, which provides support for ARM Mali GPUs, have reached Vulkan 1.1 compatibility, while others such as v3dv and dzn still operate under version 1.0 of the API.
OpenGL support improvements and transition to Vulkan 1.4
Among the main new features presented in this new version of Mesa 25.0, it stands out that At the OpenGL level, Mesa has managed to offer full compatibility with version 4.6 to a wide range of controllers, including Iris drivers for Intel GPUs from the eighth generation onwards, also Radeon driver is found (from AMD), Crocus (for older Intel architectures), as well as software rendering drivers such as llvmpipe and virgl, used in virtualization environments with QEMU/KVM.
Likewise, The capabilities of the Panfrost OpenGL driver for ARM Mali GPUs have been extended, and a “transaction elimination” mechanism has been enabled by default which discards redundant operations, thus reducing unnecessary processing. Incremental rendering implementation allows, Furthermore, a decrease in memory consumption when rendering large numbers of objects using tile processing, and the maximum supported texture width and height has been increased from 8192 to 32768 pixels.
Another of the improvements introduced in Mesa 25.0 is the Vulkan 1.4 support extension in modern drivers, which represents a jump from previous support for Vulkan 1.3.
Support for RX 9000 and AMD drivers
Table 25.0 becomes the first version of the drivers Adding initial RADV driver support for RDNA4 GPUs (GFX12, Radeon RX 9000 series), while the RadeonSI driver has been migrated to the ACO shader compilation backend developed by Valve. This new backend, written in C++ and geared towards JIT compilation, is designed to optimally generate code and significantly speed up shader compilation, especially in gaming applications.
Another relevant novelty is the Added amdgpu_virtio driver, which allows guest systems to take advantage of OpenGL and Vulkan drivers such as radeonsi, radeonsi_drv_video and radv provided by the host environment via VirtIO. This new driver promises to deliver superior performance in 3D acceleration on virtual machines compared to the existing virgl and venus drivers.
Optimizations and improvements in extensions
Table 25.0.0 too includes data management optimization improvements, such as the addition of AFBC 32x8 mode, which optimizes work with the scan buffer on some display drivers, and support for the MTK_FMT_MOD_TILE_16L32S texturing mode, which facilitates the processing of fragmented data into a temporary non-fragmented buffer before rendering.
On the other hand, the controller ANV (Intel) has been updated to include Vulkan extensions that allow decoding video in AV1 format, while the PanVK driver for ARM Mali GPUs based on the V10 architecture (such as the Mali-G610 and Mali-G310) not only now offers support for Vulkan 1.1, but it is also enabled by default on ARM systems.
This driver implements a wide range of Vulkan extensions ranging from 8-bit storage and dedicated allocation to image robustness and various query and subgroup control capabilities. In addition, the controller RADV received support for extensionss VK_KHR_maintenance8 and VK_KHR_depth_clamp_zero_one, and the rusticl driver has added support for the OpenCL extension cl_khr_depth_images.
Interested in knowing more about it, you can consult the details In the following link.
How to install Mesa drivers on Linux?
The Mesa packages are found in all Linux distributions, so its installation can be done either by downloading and compiling the source code (All the information about it herei) or in a relatively simple way, which depends on availability within the official channels of your distribution or third parties.
For those who are Ubuntu, Debian or derivatives users, In these distributions, Mesa is usually found in the official repositories. To install or upgrade:
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -yers
sudo apt install mesa-utils mesa-va-drivers mesa-vulkan-driv
If you want the Latest version from PPA (for Ubuntu and derivatives):
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kisak/kisak-mesa
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade -y
In the case of those who are users of Arch Linux and derivatives, We install these with the following command:
sudo pacman -S mesa mesa-utils mesa-demos mesa-libgl lib32-mesa lib32-mesa-libgl
For whoever they are fedora users, you should know that updated packages are provided in their repositories and you just need to run:
sudo dnf install mesa-dri-drivers mesa-va-drivers mesa-vulkan-drivers
If you want more recent versions, you can use the Mesa Copr repository:
sudo dnf copr enable grigorig/mesa-stable
sudo dnf update
Finally, for those who are openSUSE users, you can install or update by typing:
sudo zypper in mesa