Mesa NVK (NVIDIA Vulkan driver) now Vulkan 1.4 conformant on Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta GPUs

Collabora developer Faith Ekstrand has announced a nice big milestone for the open source Mesa driver NVK, the NVIDIA Vulkan driver, as it has expanded Vulkan 1.4 conformance to now include Maxwell+ (Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta GPUs).

NVK was already working for Turing and above, so this will bring support all the way back to GPUs released in 2014 like the GeForce GTX 750 and GeForce GTX 750 Ti. Plus the GeForce 800M mobile series, GeForce 900 series and GeForce 10 series. A lot of GeForce 700 series cards are on an older generation though including Fermi and Kepler, more on that below.

In a blog post they've said that the current plan is to now have NVK enabled for all of them going with Mesa 25.1, which is due to release in early May. However, they're currently waiting on Mesa 25.2 before they switch those GPUs over to using Zink (OpenGL implementation on top of Vulkan) by default.

Support may come to even older GPUs too. For Kepler, they need to add in compiler support, but they said "the driver generally works" already and work has already begun to enable it but it's likely quite some time away so no promises are being made. Fermi is more challenging to do due to the age of it, so it's "hard to predict whether Fermi support will happen at all".

Source: Collabora