Add Mesa stable releases to graphics-drivers ppa

Edwin Smith esmith at feralinteractive.com
Fri Nov 18 11:45:20 UTC 2016


Hi Everyone,

About a year ago the graphics-drivers ppa was created to host the latest
graphics drivers for gamers, this was started due to the release of Shadow
Of Mordor that required drivers that were newer than the ones canonical
bundled with Ubuntu.

https://launchpad.net/~graphics-drivers/+archive/ubuntu/ppa

This has proved very useful to gamers since it was launched, however it
only contains Nvidia proprietary drivers. We have been working with the
Mesa community to help improve the Mesa drivers so more games can run on
AMD and Intel hardware, and in the last year this has started to hit the
tipping point and support has become more and more viable when using the
very latest drivers.

The biggest issue we have is there is no way for a user to officially
download and install the latest stable versions of Mesa. For example
because the official Mesa 13.0.1 release isn’t available to install on
Ubuntu, you need to compile it yourself.

There are two commonly used PPAs that have the latest mesa drivers but
these are built from git latest around twice a week so the quality varies
depending on the status of git when it was built. Unfortunately we can't
officially recommend them as they often contain serious bugs that are still
being fixed.

https://launchpad.net/~paulo-miguel-dias/+archive/ubuntu/mesa - git built
with LLVM 4.0 (git)

https://launchpad.net/~oibaf/+archive/ubuntu/graphics-drivers/ - git built
using LLVM 3.9

I’d like to suggest that official Mesa releases are also added to the
graphics-drivers PPA using the release information on the mesa.org website:

http://www.mesa3d.org/relnotes.html

Almost every Feral title would benefit from running on the latest version
of the Mesa drivers as they bring performance, stability and much needed
features. Many titles simply cannot run without the latest drivers. This is
also true for most other games from other developers as well.

This should really help adoption of the newer graphics drivers on Mesa
which should help improve the experience AMD and Intel users have when
using Ubuntu as they will have much easier access to the latest drivers.

I look forward to seeing what the community thinks of this suggestion.

Thanks,

Edwin

-- 
Edwin Smith
Head Of Production
Feral Interactive Limited
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