Mesa (computer graphics)

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 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 most graphics hardware manufacturers, and other interested parties, such as Valve Corporation.