How is Mesa different from OpenGL drivers?

opengl mesa
user782220 picture user782220 · Sep 12, 2012 · Viewed 9.7k times · Source

What exactly does it mean to say that Mesa is an implementation of OpenGL? Don't the drivers of my Nvidia card implement all the OpenGL functions, etc.? So given that the drivers of my Nvidia card are taking Opengl calls and handing them off to the hardware, what exactly does Mesa do? Can someone clarify the distinction between Mesa and drivers?

Answer

datenwolf picture datenwolf · Sep 12, 2012

Can someone clarify the distinction between Mesa and drivers?

Mesa provides the client side OpenGL interface for the open source GPU drivers based on the DRI2/DRM architecture. Or in other words: It's also a part of a driver.

If you've got the proprietary drivers from NVidia or AMD installed you don't need Mesa. If you want to use the open source drivers (nouveau, radeon, radeonhd, intel) you need Mesa.

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