Mesa 3D

Mesa is an open-source implementation of the OpenGL, Vulkan and other specifications. Its most important user surfacing parts are the two graphics drivers mostly developed and funded by Intel and AMD, which are using those implementations. The smaller GeForce graphics driver Nouveau in contrast is mostly a community effort. Mesa implements a cross-language, cross-platform (mostly on BSD and Linux distributions), vendor-neutral standard API for interfacing with diverse vendor-specific graphics hardware drivers.

Besides 3D applications such as games, modern display servers (X.org's Glamor or Wayland's Weston) use OpenGL/EGL, therefore all graphics typically go through Mesa. Proprietary graphics drivers (e.g. Nvidia GeForce driver and AMD Catalyst for Radeon) replace all of Mesa, providing their own implementation of a graphics API, rather than providing a driver that Mesa talks to. While Nvidia today promotes its proprietary driver for gaming, AMD promotes their Mesa drivers (radeon and radeonSI) over the deprecated AMD Catalyst (formerly fglrx).

Mesa is hosted by freedesktop.org and was initiated in August 1993 by Brian Paul, who is still active in the project. Mesa was subsequently widely adopted, and now contains numerous contributions from various individuals and corporations worldwide, including from the graphics hardware manufacturers of the Khronos Group that administer the OpenGL specification. For Linux, development has also been partially driven by crowdfunding.

Mesa is known as housing implementation of graphic APIs. Historically the main API that Mesa has implemented is OpenGL, along with other Khronos Group related specifications (like OpenVG, OpenGL ES or recently EGL). But Mesa can implement other APIs and indeed it did with Glide (deprecated) and Direct3D 9 (since July 2013.). Mesa is also not specific to Unix-like operating systems: on Windows for example, Mesa provides an OpenGL API over DirectX.