Mesa (computer graphics)

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2022-01-20 13:00:05

Mesa, also called Mesa3D and The Mesa 3D Graphics Library, is an open-source software implementation of OpenGL, Vulkan, and other graphics API specifications. Mesa translates these specifications to vendor-specific graphics hardware drivers.

Its most important users are two graphics drivers mostly developed and funded by Intel and AMD for their respective hardware (AMD promotes their Mesa drivers Radeon and RadeonSI over the deprecated AMD Catalyst, and Intel has only supported the Mesa driver). Proprietary graphics drivers (e.g., Nvidia GeForce driver and Catalyst) replace all of Mesa, providing their own implementation of a graphics API. An open-source effort to write a Mesa Nvidia driver called Nouveau is mostly developed by the community.

Besides 3D applications such as games, modern display servers (X.org's Glamor or Wayland's Weston) use OpenGL/EGL; therefore all graphics typically go through Mesa.