Mesa (computer graphics)

Mesa 3D is a free graphics library that implements the OpenGL specification and is used on many operating systems such as Linux, AmigaOS3, AmigaOS4 SkyOS, Haiku, ZETA and BSD to implement OpenGL functionality. Hardware accelerated 3D graphics is made ​​possible by the combination with the Direct Rendering Infrastructure. The sources of the Mesa library are under the MIT license.

In August 1993, Brian Paul began developing a graphics library that should be compatible with the then new OpenGL programming. In November 1994 he received the approval of SGI to publish Mesa, and in February 1995 appeared Mesa 1.0. OpenGL was by this time not yet widely available, and many developers came through Mesa with OpenGL in contact. In October 1996, Mesa 2.0 was released, which supported OpenGL 1.1. The version 2.2 which was released in March 1998, supports hardware acceleration via 3dfx Glide. Published on 22 June 2007 version 7.0 supports OpenGL 2.1 for the first time. With the release of version 8.0 on February 9, 2012, the OpenGL 3.0 specification is supported. With version 9.0 on 8 October 2012, the support for OpenGL 3.1 was added.

Software Architecture

The Mesa 3D project includes and also maintains implementations of various programming interfaces for the hardware -accelerated rasterization:

The developed also under a free license Wine project includes an implementation of Microsoft's Direct3D Version 9 This can be used either with the aid of a translation of Direct3D calls to OpenGL calls, or even since the publication of the Gallium3D state tracker for Direct3D 9 directly.

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