NVK Lands Sparse Memory Support - Enabling More Games To Run On This Open-Source Driver

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NVK Lands Sparse Memory Support - Enabling More Games To Run On This Open-Source Driver

Mesa's NVK Vulkan driver for open-source NVIDIA support has merged sparse memory support. This is a big milestone as it's needed for running a number of newer games under Linux...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVK-Sparse-Memory-Support

[luno]

this is so awesome, only merge request I am waiting for is https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/...requests/24795 as it was required to run Hyprland (which uses gles2), then I am planning to switch fully to NVK as Firefox is less laggy in NVK and I don't game that much

[RejectModernity]

NVK is about to surpass ANV driver . It took 2 fucking years for intel to make their half baked subpar implementation.

[user1]

NVK is about to surpass ANV driver . It took 2 fucking years for intel to make their half baked subpar implementation.

Not only that, another thing that makes me lose confidence in Intel is how often they split their driver codebases at a point when the older hardware is only a few years old. Compared to that, on AMD side all the latest drivers (AMDGPU kernel driver + RadeonSi and RADV Mesa drivers) support all the hardware from GCN 1.0 (from late 2011!) all the way up to the latest RDNA 3.0.

[mbriar]

NVK is about to surpass ANV driver . It took 2 fucking years for intel to make their half baked subpar implementation.

Yes, but to me it looks like the reason is probably that nvidia has just hardware that's much nicer to work with than intel, after all the main nvk developer also worked for intel on anv for many years prior.

[Quackdoc]

Its probably worth keeping in mind that unlike ANV, NVK is a brand new techstack, I believe they claimed it was new from the ground up a while ago. This means they are starting from a clean slate, with everything the devs learned working on various other drivers, No need to work around super old bugs or design decisions from I think it's nearly a decade ago now. I think that is worth at least some consideration. OFC I wouldnt be surprised if DG2 is also just an out right pain to develop for, Arc ofc is still a new card, and growing pains are for sure to be expected there too.

[jeisom]

It definitely is a from the ground up implementation. And because of the fact that the Nouveau stack was so far behind do to the lack of reclocking, a lack of users and the binary driver, allows breaking things and makes it a great place to start for really thinking about how best to approach implementing it in such a way that can create reusable components for other drivers. Few "I need this done now" users like you'd need for say a SOC gpu driver for instance.

[rmfx]

NVK is about to surpass ANV driver . It took 2 fucking years for intel to make their half baked subpar implementation.

Before claiming it’s surpassing anything, I want to see figures!
Last time we saw a benchmark, it was running at barely 5 percent of the perfs from blob driver.
If this driver technically works fine but transform my rtx4080 into a gtx860, it is worthless.
Let’s give them faith for sure, but let’s give ourself some more expectations regarding the results before claiming this is the new shit.

[STiAT]

NVK is about to surpass ANV driver . It took 2 fucking years for intel to make their half baked subpar implementation.

Intel does not have Faith (Ekstrand) . NVK has a 2 year history, but I think it's fair to say that it really took off once Faith started working on it in July 2023 (not sure who hired Collabora, I'd guess Valve ).

[jeisom]

Before claiming it’s surpassing anything, I want to see figures!
Last time we saw a benchmark, it was running at barely 5 percent of the perfs from blob driver.
If this driver technically works fine but transform my rtx4080 into a gtx860, it is worthless.
Let’s give them faith for sure, but let’s give ourself some more expectations regarding the results before claiming this is the new shit.

The clocks work now. NVK was still lacking some extensions the last time I tried it so it was really hard to test several weeks ago as many games are needing D12 needing said extensions. OpenGL using the classic driver was like 60% if I recall correctly. I didn't manage to get zink working at the time, but it should perform much better when using it.