Well, it happened! The open source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA GPUs named NVK has been officially merged into Mesa. This means it will be available as an experimental option in the Mesa 23.3 release due in a couple of months (not the upcoming 23.2 release). Note: this is not made by NVIDIA directly but various open source devs.
Over a year of work went into the driver by developers Faith Ekstrand, Karol Herbst, Dave Airlie and a bunch of other community contributors. Additionally Danilo Krummrich has been working on building up Nouveau kernel support for the new memory binding and execution API required by NVK.
What hardware is currently supported? Turing (RTX 20XX and GTX 16XX) and later GPUs, with plans to go far back even to Kepler (GeForce 600 and 700 series). You'll need a new Linux kernel though with the support being included for the new API it needs in Linux 6.6 and later.
A big milestone for NVK to be included in Mesa but it's far from finished. Plenty of games will work with it both Native and running through compatibility layers like Wine / Proton but plenty also won't work properly. It's all still pretty experimental overall but it's getting there.
See more in the Collabora Q&A post.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
walther von stolzing Aug 7, 2023
apologies
MESA Jar Jar Binks! MESA your humble servant!Yousa in big doo-doo this time!
apologies
Caldathras Aug 7, 2023
What hardware is currently supported? Turing (RTX 20XX and GTX 16XX) and later GPUs, with plans to go far back even to Kepler (GeForce 600 and 700 series).
Looking forward to the future Kepler support!
(That always used to hold me back and get me in way over my head when upgrading kernels, when the Nvidia glue won't compile and you have to wait for them to fix it for the new kernel... I would never go back to that but if kernel and Mesa support for Nvidia got as good as support for AMD cards, I'd consider it again)
Avehicle7887 Aug 7, 2023
(That always used to hold me back and get me in way over my head when upgrading kernels, when the Nvidia glue won't compile and you have to wait for them to fix it for the new kernel..
As someone who compiles his own kernels, this used to be a nightmare on Nvidia. Usually hit or miss, going through forums for a solution and all that.
It's nice to see open source Nvidia support becoming a reality, but my bets are on Intel these days, their open source support is gradually becoming a viable alternative to AMD.
Linux_Rocks Aug 8, 2023
I'm not really one for fan theories, but Darth Jar-Jar is a great one. lolMESA Jar Jar Binks! MESA your humble servant!Yousa in big doo-doo this time!
apologies
marcosfs93 Aug 8, 2023
At least... they are almost there!
(That always used to hold me back and get me in way over my head when upgrading kernels, when the Nvidia glue won't compile and you have to wait for them to fix it for the new kernel..
As someone who compiles his own kernels, this used to be a nightmare on Nvidia. Usually hit or miss, going through forums for a solution and all that.
It's nice to see open source Nvidia support becoming a reality, but my bets are on Intel these days, their open source support is gradually becoming a viable alternative to AMD.
I am hopeful Intel can provide some competition as the GPU market is in a really bad place for gamers right now. Intel on paper should offer a really good product on Linux but every time I look up ARC performance for Linux it doesn't appear to be so good. I'm hoping by the time Battlemage is released they will have improved driver support considerably.
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