Open-source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA hardware in Mesa, NVK, is now ready for prime time

The future of NVIDIA hardware on Linux is here with the open source Vulkan driver NVK in Mesa, as there's now a Merge Request to have it shipped by default. Once approved and merged into Mesa, this should then ship with the Mesa 24.1 release due out hopefully at the start of May.

NVK is also now a conformant Vulkan 1.3 driver on Turing (RTX 2000 and GTX 1600 series), Ampere (RTX 3000 series), and Ada (RTX 4000 series) GPUs. From developer Faith Ekstrand in the Collabora blog post, "Not only have we jumped forward three Vulkan versions, but the new test runs were done with the GSP firmware enabled and includes Ampere and Ada GPUs. Also, unlike the initial 1.0 run, there are no hacks this time. Every test we passed in those conformance test runs also passes on upstream Mesa".

Ekstrand also mentioned lots of work went into ensuring DXVK (part of Proton for D3D9, D3D10 and D3D11 to Vulkan) would run completely out of the box with Mesa, and work continues on D3D12 to Vulkan work via VKD3D-Proton. 

Additionally, the OpenGL support, they're still expecting Zink + NVK to be the plan, as noted in our previous article. Because it's much more performant than the old original nouveau OpenGL driver and should keep improving too on features, performance and stability.

So in later distribution releases, you should hopefully get access to it out of the box with no configuration required if you have an NVIDIA GPU that's currently supported.

What a great time for open source. Fantastic work by all involved in this project.