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Mesa

From PCGamingWiki, the wiki about fixing PC games
Graphics Adaptor

AMD Catalyst Control Center
AMD Radeon Software
Intel Arc Control
Mesa
Nvidia Control Panel

The open source graphics implementation of OpenGL and Vulkan among other graphics APIs for Linux. Intel, AMD and Nvidia all have driver support built into the Linux Kernel but Nvidia's Mesa driver is not recommended for gaming.

Much better OpenGL performance on AMD graphics than on Windows.

Related articles

Linux
Wine
AMD
AMD Radeon Software

Installation

On many distributions the Mesa package will already be installed, if you are performing a minimal install from scratch (such as Debian or Arch Linux) you will have to install the mesa package, if you are playing games that have a 32-bit binary then enable multilib repositories in your package manager's configuration file and install the mesa:i386 or lib32-mesa packages.

In addition install your graphics vendors Vulkan drivers as well as the 32-bit packages.

Please check what the mesa packages are named for the distribution you have installed.

Simple Modifications

Improving OpenGL Performance

Run mesa_glthread=true /path/to/game if the game uses OpenGL as it's graphics API

As of Mesa 22.3, this enviroment varriable is enabled by default on systems using the radeonsi driver[1].
For Steam games you select the game, right click it to access Properties and put mesa_glthread=true %command% in the launch options.
For a complete list of games that automatically have this enabled, check Mesa's configuration file.

Enabling Adaptive Sync

  • AMD graphics users must be using Kernel 5.0 or later with Mesa 19 or later, HDMI Freesync requires Kernel 5.13 or later.
HDMI 2.1 4K Freesync is not supported due to licensing issues.
On Xorg Adaptive Sync can only be used with 1 monitor or by setting up different X sessions per-screen.
Enable Adaptive Sync on AMDGPU running X session.
  1. Open /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-amdgpu.conf as root and add Option "VariableRefresh" "true"
  2. Save the file and restart Xorg (rebooting your PC works).

Anisotropic filtering

Run RADV_TEX_ANISO=16 /path/to/game to force the highest filtering for programs using the Vulkan rendering API running on the AMDGPU driver, for OpenGL programs or users running the old radeon driver use AMD_TEX_ANISO instead.

  • Accepted values are 0, 2, 4, 8, and 16.

Control Panel

There is no GUI graphics control panel by default, users must install one themselves.


References

  1. ↑ radeonsi: enable glthread by default - last accessed on 2023-03-21