3.4. What is Mesa?

Mesa <http://www.mesa3d.org > is a free implementation of the OpenGL API, designed and written by Brian Paul. While it's not officially certified (that would take more money than an open source project has), it's an almost fully compliant OpenGL implementation conforming to the ARB specifications. It's reported that Mesa is even faster than SGI's own OpenGL implementation.

Just like OpenGL, Mesa makes use of hardware acceleration whenever possible.


When a particular graphics task isn't able to be hardware accelerated by the video card, it's software rendered; the task is done by your computer's CPU instead. This means that there are different builds of Mesa depending on what kind of video card you have. Each build uses a different library as a backend renderer. For example, if you have a Voodoo I, II or III card under XFree86 3.x, you'd use mesa+glide2 (written by David Bucciarelli) which is the Mesa implementation of OpenGL that uses Glide2 as a backend to render for graphical operations.

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