Collabora has reported to 9to5Linux.com that their NVK open-source Vulkan graphics driver for NVIDIA hardware within the Mesa graphics stack is now stable and fit for mainstream use, and no longer just experimental.
According to a blog post by Collabora’s Faith Ekstrand, a new merge request submitted in the Mesa graphics stack earlier today removes implementation warnings for NVK deemed non-conformant and alters the Meson configuration option from nouveau-experimental to nouveau, therefore stabilizing the open-source driver.
NVK was originally announced in October 2022 as a alternative for the open-source Nouveau driver for NVIDIA graphics cards. Since that announcement, Collabora has been diligently working to ready the driver for mainstream use, and its release is imminent, with plans to include NVK as a stable driver in the upcoming Mesa 24.1 graphics stack.
The recently released Mesa 24.0 graphics stack already includes the NVK driver, but it was still in an experimental phase. Unfortunately, not all Linux distributions have adopted the Mesa 24 graphics stack at the time of reporting, and with the anticipated release of Mesa 24.1 in the next few months, many will have to wait a while longer to utilize 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.
“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,” said Faith Ekstrand.
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 1 hour ago
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