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Collabora informs 9to5Linux.com today that their NVK open-source Vulkan graphics driver for NVIDIA hardware in the Mesa graphics stack is no longer experimental and it’s now stable and ready for prime time.
Collabora’s Faith Ekstrand writes in a blog post that a new merge request that landed earlier today in the Mesa graphics stack and which removes the non-conformant implementation warnings for NVK and changes the Meson configuration option from nouveau-experimental to nouveau, makes the open-source driver stable.
NVK was first announced in October 2022 as a drop-in replacement for the open-source Nouveau driver for NVIDIA graphics cards. Since then, Collabora has been working hard to make it ready for prime time, and the wait is now over as NVK will be shipped as a stable driver with the upcoming Mesa 24.1 graphics stack.
The recently released Mesa 24.0 graphics stack already ships with the NVK driver, but in an experimental state. Unfortunately, not all Linux distros adopted the Mesa 24 graphics stack at the moment of writing and Mesa 24.1 is expected to be released in the coming months, so most of us will have to wait a little longer to enjoy NVK.
Also today, Collabora announced that NVK is now a Vulkan 1.3 conformant on Turing (NVIDIA RTX 2000 and NVIDIA GTX 1600 series), Ampere (NVIDIA RTX 3000 series), and Ada (NVIDIA RTX 4000 series) GPUs.
Performance-wise, Collabora says that while many video games are running at 60 FPS or better on recent NVIDIA GPUs, they’re still working on improving the performance of the Vulkan driver, which will be done regularly with new Mesa graphics stack releases from now on, so make sure that you keep your Linux PCs up to date at all times for a better gaming experience.
Image credits: Collabora
Last updated 2 months ago
