Many Linux distributions now provide thridparty closed source drivers through specialized package repositories. Vendor provided OpenGL drivers are typically much faster of a much higher quality than Mesa's which can be quite buggy. To get the best performance from your graphics card you'll need to install the vendor provided driver. If you have NVIDIA or AMD graphics hardware Mesa is not your best option.

Mesa for your GPUīefore getting into details of Mesa graphics hardware drivers, a disclaimer.

If you're running a Linux OS on a system without graphics hardware then this page is for you. Mesa also provides several software based renderers for use on systems without graphics hardware. Mesa is an open source OpenGL implementation that supports a wide range of graphics hardware each with it's own back-end called a renderer. On Linux the default OpenGL drivers are typically provided by Mesa. On Apple Mac OSX just use the default OS provided drivers. On Windows download and install the latest drivers for your system's graphics hardware. If you're running a Windows or Mac OSX operating system, this page is not for you. Most operating systems provide a default OpenGL library. ParaView and VTK make use of OpenGL for rendering. 5.2 Can ParaView be built with X11/GPU accelerated OpenGL and OSMesa in the same build?.5.1 MPI-Parallel rendering with OSMesa Gallium llvmpipe state-tracker.5 Configuring ParaView for use with OSMesa.4 A comparison of OSMesa Gallium llvmpipe, OSMesa classic and, GPU Accelerated Rendering Performance.3.2 Installing Mesa llvmpipe and swr drivers.

Mac os opengl driver