Open Source NVIDIA Vulkan Driver NVK Reaches Vulkan 1.0 Conformance

Collabora announced today that its open-source NVK graphics driver in Mesa is now officially conformant with the Vulkan 1.0 graphics API on NVIDIA Turing hardware.

“This is the first time any Nouveau driver has gotten the Khronos conformance badge on any API.”

Collabora says that NVK gaining official Vulkan conformance is the first time any Nouveau graphics driver has gotten the Khronos conformance badge on any API. For Collabora, this means that they can now pass the entire Vulkan conformance test suite against NVK.

For the rest of the world, this is a big step for Linux gaming using the NVK Vulkan driver in Mesa as it now meets the bar required to claim to officially support the Vulkan graphics API. For now, this is supported only on NVIDIA Turing or later graphics cards.

“There are some legal implications to this which matter to the Mesa project, but most users don’t care about them,” said Faith Ekstrand in a blog post. “From the perspective of users, it means the driver should pretty much work on Turing and later GPUs. There will still be bugs, of course, but those bugs are likely to be app-specific. Most stuff should just work.”

Collabora also merged a new back-end compiler for NVK into the Mesa graphics stack, which is required for Vulkan 1.0 conformance because the old compiler had some issues with several tests.

For now, NVK is still missing most of the Vulkan API features, but Collabora developer Faith Ekstrand is confident that Vulkan 1.3 support will be enabled next year, along with support for Maxwell hardware in the new back-end compiler.

“Once the new compiler is a little more feature-complete, I hope to start taking deep dives into apps, working on app-specific bug fixing as well as performance improvements,” added Ekstrand.

With that in mind, it looks like Linux gaming on NVIDIA hardware is getting a powerful new Vulkan driver in NVK, which not only that it’s fully open source but we also hope to be ready for mass adoption by the end of 2024.

Image credits: Collabora

Last updated 1 week ago