What purpose does Mesa serve today?
Hardware-accelerated OpenGL implementations are available for most popular operating systems today. Still, Mesa serves at least these purposes: • Mesa is used as the core of the open-source XFree86/X.org DRI hardware drivers. • Mesa is quite portable and allows OpenGL to be used on systems that have no other OpenGL solution. • Software rendering with Mesa serves as a reference for validating the hardware drivers. • A software implementation of OpenGL is useful for experimentation, such as testing new rendering techniques. • Mesa can render images with deep color channels: 16-bit integer and 32-bit floating point color channels are supported. This capability is only now appearing in hardware. • Mesa’s internal limits (max lights, clip planes, texture size, etc) can be changed for special needs (hardware limits are hard to overcome).
