NVIDIA DLSS support in progress for NVK, the open source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA GPUs

This is pretty big and exciting, the open source NVK driver for NVIDIA GPUs is on a path towards getting NVIDIA DLSS support. Announced on their Bluesky profile by one of Valve's Linux developers, Autumn Ashton, who has previously done a fair amount of work on the likes of DXVK and VKD3D-Proton (and created D9VK).

Ashton mentioned how it took 3 days but they got DLSS to work on NVK noting:

After about 3 days of work, I got DLSS to work on NVK (the open source NVIDIA driver in Mesa)!

DLSS is essentially just some launched Cuda kernels, so it was just a matter of implementing the VK_NVX_binary_import and VK_NVX_image_view_handle extensions.

With an image noted to be "(Control, 960x540 -> 1920x1080)":

Image Credit - Autumn Ashton

Further in the Bluesky thread Ashton noted:

These extensions are used by DXVK and VKD3D-Proton via DXVK-NVAPI to implement DLSS. Although, that alone was not an easy feat because the surface area of Cuda is pretty huge and parsing the cubins is difficult as there's these weirdly packed attributes spread across-multiple sections an ELF where some of the metadata is ordinal-based and some of it is name-based and oh, the ELF is also inside another container of ELFs (elves?).

But once you parse all that out, it's actually not *that* bad.

The surface area is mostly in the parsing of the cubins, the actual dispatch code is tiny! ATM, it only supports DLSS versions that have code compiled for the GPU you are using. If you try and run old DLSS on a new GPU, that won't work currently. PTX->NIR is much harder.

Pretty great to see the NVK driver continue to make big improvements. One day perhaps the open source driver might end up being the best way for NVIDIA GPU owners on Linux.