Mesa (computer graphics)

Mesa

Original author(s)	Brian Paul
Developer(s)	Currently: Igalia, Collabora, Valve, Intel, Google, AMD, VMware Formerly: Tungsten Graphics[1]
Initial release	February 1995
Stable release	24.0.5[2]  / 10 April 2024; 6 days ago (10 April 2024)
Preview release	24.0.0-rc2  / 17 January 2024; 2 months ago (17 January 2024)
Repository	https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa
Written in	C++, C, assembly language
Operating system	Cross-platform (BSDs, Haiku, Linux, etc.)
Type	Graphics library
License	MIT License
Website	https://www.mesa3d.org

Mesa, also called Mesa3D and The Mesa 3D Graphics Library, is an open source 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 developed mostly 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.

Mesa is hosted by freedesktop.org and was initiated in August 1993 by Brian Paul, who is still active in the project. Mesa was subsequently widely adopted and now contains numerous contributions from various individuals and corporations worldwide, including from the graphics hardware manufacturers of the Khronos Group that administer the OpenGL specification. For Linux, development has also been partially driven by crowdfunding.^[3]