Mesa 26.0 Brings Ray Tracing Updates for AMD Radeon on Linux

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Mesa 26.0.0 ships Vulkan 1.4 targets and RADV ray tracing performance work



Mesa 26.0.0 is now available as the latest feature release of the open-source graphics stack used on Linux and other environments, including within Microsoft’s Windows Subsystem for Linux. The release announcement lists support targets that include Vulkan 1.4, OpenGL 4.6, OpenGL ES 3.2, and OpenCL 3.0, alongside the usual driver updates across the project. 

Raytracing improvements for AMD hardware

A big focus this cycle is AMD Radeon ray tracing on Vulkan. The official release notes call out ray tracing performance work for RADV since Mesa 25.3, with contributions credited in part to Valve’s Linux graphics efforts. Back in January, Mesa developer Natalie Vock published a deep dive on RADV RT pipeline compilation changes in Mesa 26.0, describing a move toward proper function calls and separating previously inlined shader work, with an example claim of more than 2x faster RT passes in Ghostwire Tokyo on her test path.

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