VOOZH about

URL: https://www.phoronix.com/news/PowerVR-Mesa-More-GPUs

⇱ Imagination PowerVR Mesa Vulkan Driver Enables Unofficial Support For More GPUs - Phoronix


👁 Phoronix

Imagination PowerVR Mesa Vulkan Driver Enables Unofficial Support For More GPUs

Written by Michael Larabel in Mesa on 11 October 2025 at 08:21 PM EDT. 8 Comments
Merged today for the Mesa 25.3 graphics driver code is enabling support for more PowerVR Imagination GPUs within the "PVR" Vulkan driver albeit not officially supported nor in active development. Your mileage may vary but for some users with certain GPUs may work out well enough.

Merged for Mesa 25.3 is adding the necessary device information bits for more supported and unsupported GPU cores. This includes some additional PowerVR Series 6XE, 6XT, 8XE, and B-Series GPUs. This complements the PVR driver currently being focused on the A-Series AXE-1-16M and the B-Series BXS-4-64 / BXM-4-64 GPU IP.

The newly-added documentation for the open-source PVR driver explains:
"The following hardware is unsupported and not under active development:

========= =========== ==============
Product Series B.V.N.C
========= =========== ==============
GX6250 Series 6XT 4.45.2.58
GX6650 Series 6XT 4.46.6.62
G6110 Series 6XE 5.9.1.46
GE8300 Series 8XE 22.68.54.30
GE8300 Series 8XE 22.102.54.38
BXE-2-32 B-Series 36.29.52.182
BXE-4-32 B-Series 36.50.54.182
========= =========== ==============

Device info and firmware_ have been made available for these devices, typically due to community requests or interest, but no support is guaranteed beyond this."

Beyond the device information bits needed in the driver, Imagination Tech has also uploaded additional firmware binaries needed for the support to their firmware Git repository on FreeDesktop.org's GitLab.

👁 Image


Again, this merge expands the support for the PowerVR GPUs where the PVR Vulkan open-source driver will load but beyond that your mileage isn't guaranteed.

These actual patches merged date back months and stem from feature requests going back years from users interested in seeing this Mesa Vulkan driver work on more of the PowerVR GPUs.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.