Mesa 26.1.6 Released: Targeted Bug Fixes for the Amber Branch
Mesa 26.1.6 is out now, bringing a fresh batch of fixes to the Amber stable branch without introducing any new features. The release targets regressions and stability issues that have cropped up since the previous 26.1.5 point release, landing on July 29, 2026. If you are running OpenGL 4.6 or Vulkan 1.4 drivers on the Amber track, you will want to grab this update.
As with most point releases in the 26.x cycle, the scope is narrow. You are not looking for performance jumps or API additions here. Instead, the Mesa project focused on squashing bugs that disrupted gaming workloads and broke hardware-specific functionality. The team logged over 60 commits from more than 35 developers, with heavy lifting spread across Intel, AMD, and software rendering paths.
Gaming and Hardware Quirks
The biggest wins in this round affect gaming regressions that have frustrated users on newer silicon. Most notably, the fix brings ambient occlusion back to The Chronicles of Riddick – Assault on Dark Athena. That feature has been broken for a while in 26.x versions, so this is a welcome return for retro gamers.
For those testing AMD's RDNA 4 lineup, the fix addresses a page fault that surfaced in Doom Eternal. The issue was somewhat reproducible on the RX 9070, making this release important if you are running games on the new hardware. Similarly, Horizon Forbidden West had issues with misrendered lighting effects and shader quirk regressions affecting both the Intel Arc B390 and AMD drivers. That is also resolved here.
Blockland users reported crashes when setting shader quality to high, which Mesa has now patched. These fixes suggest the upstream Amber branch is still sorting out quirks on hardware that was either newly supported or significantly reworked recently.
Intel and AMD Driver Improvements
Intel's Vulkan driver, ANV, received targeted attention. The bottom-of-pipe timestamp latching now correctly waits for vkCmdDispatch completion. This fix resolves broken compute-pass timing on Arc B390 and Panther Lake hardware, which matters a lot for applications built on wgpu.
Cooperative matrix loads from shared memory were returning incorrect tiles on Xe3 and Panther Lake architectures, producing wrong matmul results. That has been corrected. The driver also now handles 2D-array to 3D blits properly and fixes runtime pipeline binary data assumptions in GetPipelineBinaryDataKHR.
On the AMD side, RADV acceleration structure refit of AABB geometry no longer loses intersection candidates on NAVI32 hardware. This is a significant improvement for ray-tracing workloads. The fix also addresses guardband logic, fragment shader barycentric calculations, and VCN video encode pipeline sizing issues that could cause client segfaults.
Video and Software Rendering
The Vulkan video codec pipeline saw extensive corrections. AV1 decoder and encoder buffer_delay coding is now accurate, and H265 reference picture list modifications are properly coded. If you have been hitting encoding issues with AV1 or H265, this release should smooth things out.
Apple Silicon and Raspberry Pi users should also note a fix for a segfault during H.265 hardware decoding on the Raspberry Pi 5. That regression was introduced in Mesa 26.1.3 and 26.1.4, so it has been hanging around for a couple of point releases.
Other notable patches include fixes for Zink swap interval handling, Rusticl/OpenCL FP16 lowering, and Panfrost memory leaks on screen destroy. LLVMpipe software rendering also gets an attribute ordering fix that should help with input mismatches.
Download
The Mesa 26.1.6 source tarball is available. You can verify the release with the SHA256 hash 5296b88a0f1e012e2cb9ada150a2bbadf728ca81e5a4fb2ab43c83a4d2158606.
Head to docs.mesa3d.org/relnotes/26.1.6 for the full release notes and detailed changelog.
If you build from source, keep in mind that the Amber branch is designed for stability. This release reflects that philosophy by addressing regressions rather than pushing new capabilities. For users on RDNA 4 or Panther Lake, the fixes here are likely relevant to your daily drive,
