Mesa (computer graphics)

Common card · No. 246169

Mesa, also called Mesa3D and The Mesa 3D Graphics Library, is an open source implementation of OpenGL, OpenGL ES, Vulkan, and other graphics API specifications, as well as OpenCL for GPU compute. Mesa implements these specifications with vendor-specific graphics hardware drivers, software rendering drivers, layered (translation) drivers, and more. On Linux systems, GPU acceleration is provided primarily through Mesa. AMD supports the RadeonSI and RADV drivers in Mesa as their official GPU drivers on Linux. Intel has only ever supported the Mesa drivers on Linux systems. Google uses the Freedreno driver in Mesa in some Chromebooks with Qualcomm processors. Systems with Nvidia cards usually use the proprietary Nvidia GeForce driver, but there are ongoing efforts to write Mesa Nvidia drivers called Nouveau and NVK. As of 2026, NVK is still usually slower than the proprietary driver, but the performance gap is continually decreasing as it is developed further. Besides 3D applications such as...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Erik Faye-Lund, Mesa3D, MIT