Check out this great overview of NVK, the open source NVIDIA Vulkan driver

I hope the NVK driver properly implements all the Wayland things NVIDIA has been dragging their feet on. NVENC would be nice, but I'm fine with not having it. CUDA might be necessary for some of my workflows at some point...

I am thoroughly sick of using the proprietary drivers. It's great to see this much progress on NVK in such a short period of time, with the implication that NVK might be a viable replacement for the proprietary drivers sometime next year. The proprietary drivers have been a pain point for the desktop for so long, even if they're better than the AMD drivers in some ways.

Also, cheers to Collabora for making big inroads with Wayland by funding development on both the Wayland Wine driver and NVK this year. Or whoever is funding Collabora to fund these developers. Or both. Apparently Google was funding some of this work on the Wine Wayland driver..?


Last edited by pleasereadthemanual on 21 December 2023 at 3:44 pm UTC

Wow, so I can actually use my steam machine again? Or are those too old? There was vulkan support on the steam machine. But taking it out of the hands of nvidia is only positive.

Wow, so I can actually use my steam machine again? Or are those too old? There was vulkan support on the steam machine. But taking it out of the hands of nvidia is only positive.

Ah, only new cards. My 2012 laptop with an 2014 AMD on the express card bus was more capable than my 2016 steam machine with unswappable unsupported nvidia :-(.

Wow, so I can actually use my steam machine again? Or are those too old? There was vulkan support on the steam machine. But taking it out of the hands of nvidia is only positive.

Ah, only new cards. My 2012 laptop with an 2014 AMD on the express card bus was more capable than my 2016 steam machine with unswappable unsupported nvidia :-(.

NVK is looking to add support for Maxwell-era cards (2014+) once they have Turing onwards working properly.

The GPU I have is a kepler-based graphics card, which is about to be discontinued by NVIDIA, it is literally going to have a higher lifespan on Windows than on Linux due to the transition to Wayland, since the proprietary drivers for this graphics card have already entered the legacy branch for a long time, which is ridiculous, the planned obsolescence caused by proprietary drivers is alienating.

NVENC would be nice, but I'm fine with not having it. CUDA might be necessary for some of my workflows at some point...

Vulkan Video Decoding (and encoding) is a thing and might be a good alternative for NVENC at some point, especially for people opting to ditch the proprietary driver.

Probably, the things people are going to miss out on is CUDA and maybe DLSS, which I assume will not work without the proprietary driver.

The GPU I have is a kepler-based graphics card, which is about to be discontinued by NVIDIA, it is literally going to have a higher lifespan on Windows than on Linux due to the transition to Wayland, since the proprietary drivers for this graphics card have already entered the legacy branch for a long time, which is ridiculous, the planned obsolescence caused by proprietary drivers is alienating.

My R9 Fury is also considered "legacy" by AMD proprietary drivers on both Windows and Linux, and also AMDVLK, so no Vulkan 1.3 support and no Vulkan Video. Runs great on the latest Mesa drivers though, which means Vulkan 1.3 and Vulkan Video (still experimental though).

Actually, I got to experience the whole upbringing of the open stack using this card which was an exciting journey of sorts, and earlier this year I received an RTX2070S as a very generous gift so now I get to experience almost the same thing again all over using hardware from team green.

This is nice to see, and congratulations to the developers. Is anyone knowledgeable about how sustainable NVK could be while the manufacturer is largely hostile to open source? For example, I worry that nvidia would release new cards on which NVK doesn't work, and may never work. While I know they are going to be somewhat constrained by the API/ABI ecosystem, it's hard for me to imagine this being sustainable in the long term; perhaps I'll be pleasantly surprised.

My hope is that as NVK gets progressively better nvidia will "give up" and embrace open source the way AMD has, but I'm not holding my breath.

Guessing these open-source nvk drivers will never get DLSS, HDMI2.1, and possibly no RT acceleration from the RTX cores.

Guessing these open-source nvk drivers will never get DLSS, HDMI2.1, and possibly no RT acceleration from the RTX cores.

Do you know what the situation is with the AMD drivers? My understanding is that the HDMI standard prevents a free software implementation of the standard (due to patents, maybe?) so the AMDGPU PRO drivers need to be used for that?

I'm probably fine with not having most of these features in the drivers so long as my Wayland desktop is less buggy. CUDA might be a requirement for Blender/DaVinci Resolve but I don't use either of them (yet). I've never used DLSS and I don't know what RT acceleration is despite having an RTX card, so I assume I don't use it..?

NVENC would be nice, but I'm fine with not having it. CUDA might be necessary for some of my workflows at some point...

Vulkan Video Decoding (and encoding) is a thing and might be a good alternative for NVENC at some point, especially for people opting to ditch the proprietary driver.

Probably, the things people are going to miss out on is CUDA and maybe DLSS, which I assume will not work without the proprietary driver.

I wasn't even thinking of decoding until you mentioned it, but now that we're talking about it, I hope Vulkan Video Decoding is able to work as a replacement for some codecs. I do wonder about VP8/VP9 and other codecs, though; it only seems to be focused on H.264/5 for now?

I don't know if anyone at Collabora is crazy enough to build an alternative implementation of CUDA/DLSS (is that even possible?), but I can hope.

Do you know what the situation is with the AMD drivers? My understanding is that the HDMI standard prevents a free software implementation of the standard (due to patents, maybe?) so the AMDGPU PRO drivers need to be used for that?

HDMI is definitely proprietary, and also (can't remember which version) adds Ethernet to the spec -- so every HDMI display is theoretically or potentially a back-door for governments or hacker groups inside your LAN -- not good! Similar to bluetooth being a major security problem with LORA Mesh Net Radio turning bluetooth devices into Wireless Repeaters like Routers creating the Bluetooth Internet of Things to be used by who exactly? And for what?

HDMI needs to die just like 16:9. VIVA LA DISPLAY PORT, and IIRC VESA and Open Standards.

Considering the vested interest of Nancy Pelosi and other higher ups in the US, at this point I can't help but see Nvidia as an extension of the US Military Industrial Complex.

back-door for governments or hacker groups

Talk about making it political. You can just not use the HDMI LAN function, also did you know you can clearly see via router logs and such what IP's are being talked to.

If your so convinced of this stuff, you have the tools to prove it all without a doubt... Instead people spin outlandish conspiracy theories but when it comes to investigation and proof, nobody gives a shit nor can be bothered....

You could have easily stopped at, it's a potential security risk... just like using the internet is, however....


Last edited by TheRiddick on 22 December 2023 at 4:16 am UTC

I never had a problem with the good binary drivers NVIDIA provided.
It was just a bit sad that you couldn't try experiments like the gallium-nine driver because NVIDIA didn't adhere to standards.
Maybe with the new approach we won't have these problems in the future. Although i doubt that anyone will do a directX or OpenGL driver without Vulkan anymore^^

Talk about making it political.

Regarding your criticisms:


UEFI security threat:

https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/12/just-about-every-windows-and-linux-device-vulnerable-to-new-logofail-firmware-attack/

Apparently a news story from today dropped on this exact issue.

https://x.com/Barchart/status/1738360359201771854?s=20

Its not my fault Pelosi is a politician. Who bought 5M of Nvidia literally today IIUC.

Normal people are going to tilt their head.

Also, let's not forget about the blackbox "blob" and Nvidia cockblocking Linux for over a decade.

Regarding my Bluetooth LORA claims:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=-tIK3Fk-bLA

I'm totally willing to give you the benefit of the doubt and presume you are just not informed about these topics, and that's okay, but please just be the kind of people who thirst to learn and read. This is where we area unfortunately.

Edit: Bonus source showing Taiwan TVs were hacked https://businessinsider.com/taiwan-nancy-pelosi-7-11-hack-get-out-messages-cyberattack-2022-8

TL;DR -- the cyber dystopian future is already pretty much here if you've been paying attention.

And if one country or military has the backdoor, pretty much all do.


Last edited by ElectricPrism on 23 December 2023 at 4:15 am UTC