Platforms & Drivers

Mesa is primarily developed and used on Linux systems. But there’s also support for Windows, other flavors of Unix and other systems such as Haiku. We’re actively developing and maintaining several hardware and software drivers.

The primary API is OpenGL but there’s also support for OpenGL ES 1, ES2 and ES 3, OpenVG, OpenCL, VDPAU, XvMC and the EGL interface.

Supported Systems and Drivers

Hardware drivers include:

• Intel i965, i945, i915. See Intel’s website
• AMD Radeon series. See RadeonFeature
• NVIDIA GPUs. See Nouveau Wiki
• VMware virtual GPU

Software drivers include:

• llvmpipe - uses LLVM for x86 JIT code generation and is multi-threaded
• softpipe - a reference Gallium driver
• swrast - the legacy/original Mesa software rasterizer

Additional driver information:

• DRI hardware drivers for the X Window System
• Xlib / swrast driver for the X Window System and Unix-like operating systems
• Microsoft Windows
• VMware guest OS driver

Deprecated Systems and Drivers

In the past there were other drivers for older GPUs and operating systems. These have been removed from the Mesa source tree and distribution. If anyone’s interested though, the code can be found in the git repo. The list includes:

• 3dfx/glide
• Matrox
• ATI R128
• Savage
• VIA Unichrome
• SIS
• 3Dlabs gamma
• DOS
• fbdev
• DEC/VMS