Mesa 25.3.5 finally arrives after a month of CI firefighting, bringing video‑decoder tweaks and a slew of driver‑side bugfixes that matter for everyday gaming and workstation workloads. The most noticeable changes are Intel Iris’s corrected fast‑clear handling on Xe2+, AMD RADV’s repaired H.265 reference‑picture limit and tile‑size calculation, and a typo fix in Vulkan AV1 decoding that eliminates stalls on newer GPUs. Game‑specific issues such as texture pop‑ins in Crysis 2/3 Remastered and frame drops in Strange Brigade are also resolved, while the radv/video subsystem now supports stable 8K AV1 playback without crashes. 

Mesa 25.3.5 – What finally got fixed and why it matters

The Mesa 25.3.5 release is live, and after a month of CI firefighting the changelog finally looks like something worth reading. This article pulls out the driver updates that actually affect everyday gaming and workstation workloads, explains which bugs were killing performance on recent Intel and AMD GPUs, and shows how to grab the new tarball without pulling your hair out.

What’s new in Mesa 25.3.5

The build brings a handful of video‑decoder tweaks (H.265 reference picture limits, AV1 tile handling) plus a laundry list of driver‑side bugfixes. The most visible changes are:

• Intel Iris – corrected fast‑clear state handling on Xe2+ and fixed several compressed‑texture edge cases that caused occasional visual glitches in games using miptails.
• AMD RADV – more reliable tile‑size computation for video, a fix for the maxActiveReferencePictures limit that broke some H.265 streams, and a safeguard against null‑pointer derefs when loading incomplete pipeline libraries.
• Vulkan AV1 decoding – typo in the internal tile‑position math finally cleared up, preventing decode stalls on newer GPUs.

If you’ve been running Mesa 25.3.x for a while, those fixes alone are enough to justify an upgrade—especially if you noticed occasional stutter when watching 4K HDR streams or saw random texture corruption in Vulkan titles.

Intel and AMD driver fixes that actually matter

Both vendors have been the source of most regression tickets this cycle. For Intel, the clear‑color flag bug on Xe2+ caused a subtle “flash” artifact when switching between fullscreen apps; the patch forces the proper CLEAR state flag, eliminating the flash without any performance penalty. AMD users will notice that H.265 videos no longer hit the “maximum reference picture” ceiling—previously the decoder would drop frames once it thought the limit was reached, which manifested as choppy playback in some 4K streams.

A common scenario: a friend with a Ryzen 9 7950X and Radeon RX 7900 XT reported that after updating to Mesa 25.3.4, YouTube’s “high‑efficiency” mode started freezing halfway through a video. The culprit turned out to be the same maxActiveReferencePictures bug now fixed in 25.3.5.

Vulkan video codecs get a boost

The radv/video subsystem received three notable updates:

1. Tile‑size calculation – the new algorithm avoids overflow on large resolutions, meaning 8K AV1 content can finally be decoded without crashing the driver.
2. H.265 reference picture limit – raising the ceiling aligns RADV with the specification and prevents frame loss in professional editing pipelines that use many B‑frames.
3. AV1 tile position logic – a typo in the internal math caused occasional misalignment on certain GPUs; the correction restores proper motion‑vector handling.

These changes aren’t just for enthusiasts watching Netflix on a Linux box—they also improve stability for developers testing Vulkan video extensions.

Game‑specific quirks fixed

A few titles that have historically been pain points finally see relief:

• Crysis 2/3 Remastered – the driver now respects radv_ssbo_non_uniform=true, fixing texture pop‑ins that plagued some AMD rigs.
• Strange Brigade – a synchronization bug in Vulkan was patched, eliminating rare frame‑drops during heavy particle effects.
• Other titles – various fast‑clear and memory‑leak fixes (e.g., TU_DYNAMIC_STATE_RB_DEPTH_CNTL handling) clean up edge cases that showed up as occasional black screens.

If you’ve been tweaking launch options to get those games running, the new Mesa should let you drop most of the workarounds.

How to grab the tarball safely

The release assets are hosted on the official Mesa archive:

• Source –  mesa-25.3.5.tar.xz
• SHA‑256 – be472413475082df945e0f9be34f5af008baa03eb357e067ce5a611a2d44c44b
• SHA‑512 – 3db3d3c98bf476a5827705b82733d9964ec511b30882ec7e9edaddc65a5dea5e6bfb33bdcd4f97752d7a3ae9e306e8703982686cbd869567b4194decdb2f5a89
• PGP signature –  https://mesa.freedesktop.org/archive/mesa-25.3.5.tar.xz.sig 

Download the file, then verify it:

wget https://mesa.freedesktop.org/archive/mesa-25.3.5.tar.xz
wget https://mesa.freedesktop.org/archive/mesa-25.3.5.tar.xz.sig
gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 0xB8E8A6F7 # (example key)
gpg --verify mesa-25.3.5.tar.xz.sig mesa-25.3.5.tar.xz
sha256sum -c <<<"be472413475082df945e0f9be34f5af008baa03eb357e067ce5a611a2d44c44b mesa-25.3.5.tar.xz"

If the verification steps pass, you can unpack and build as usual. The release notes also mention an updated meson configuration for Python 3.14 support—make sure your build environment reflects that if you’re using the latest distro packages.

Should you upgrade now?

For anyone running a recent Intel or AMD GPU under Linux, the answer is “yes.” The fixes address real‑world video playback issues and several game‑specific crashes that have been hanging around since the 25.3 series began. Users on older hardware (e.g., pre‑Skylake Intel) won’t see dramatic gains, but the security patches and updated SHA sums are still worth applying.

Give Mesa 25.3.5 a spin; if you run into anything odd, drop a comment in the freedesktop mailing list—chances are someone has already filed a follow‑up patch for the next two‑week release cycle.