Mesa 18.0 has been officially released today after a bit of a wait, further advancing Linux graphics drivers.

As usual, if you concerned about stability, the Mesa developers do suggest waiting for the first point release 18.0.1 for any pressing issues to get fixed up. The first point release should be due in early April, with a second due later that month as well.

Since I don't actually use Mesa, being an NVIDIA user I'm not personally too clued on on just how well they're doing. From what I hear from people close to me who are on Mesa, it's come a really long way for both AMD and Intel graphics in terms of performance and compatibility with games.

Feature highlights:

Disk shader cache support for i965 when MESA_GLSL_CACHE_DISABLE environment variable is set to "0" or "false"

GL_ARB_shader_atomic_counters and GL_ARB_shader_atomic_counter_ops on r600/evergreen+

GL_ARB_shader_image_load_store and GL_ARB_shader_image_size on r600/evergreen+

GL_ARB_shader_storage_buffer_object on r600/evergreen+

GL_ARB_compute_shader on r600/evergreen+

GL_ARB_cull_distance on r600/evergreen+

GL_ARB_enhanced_layouts on r600/evergreen+

GL_ARB_bindless_texture on nvc0/kepler

OpenGL 4.3 on r600/evergreen with hw fp64 support

Support 1 binary format for GL_ARB_get_program_binary on i965. (For the 18.0 release, 0 formats continue to be supported in compatibility profiles.)

Cannonlake support on i965 and anv

Naturally there's a lot of bugs that have been fixed as well as a result of the advancement. You should see more games work as a result of this release on top of the performance improvements (of which there's been quite a few).

Note: Their release notes state it's 17.4.0 due to an issue with git struggling to detect the move (their words).