NVK Driver Nearing Vulkan 1.1 For NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20 & Newer

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NVK Driver Nearing Vulkan 1.1 For NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20 & Newer

It was just last week NVK developers were celebrating Vulkan 1.0 conformance while now this open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver within Mesa is preparing to expose Vulkan 1.1 support...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVK-Vulkan-1.1-Nears

[timofonic]

Will it be competitive against proprietary Nvidia driver? I don't think so. Imposible goal unless a big number Nvidia engineers get involved in the FOSS drivers.

[plandream]

One day, probably. It's always good to see more open source support anyway.

[jonkoops]

Will it be competitive against proprietary Nvidia driver? I don't think so. Imposible goal unless a big number Nvidia engineers get involved in the FOSS drivers.

There have been cases of hostile vendors adopting the open-source mentality once they see that it can work in practice and gives them more customers that buy their hardware.

[avis]

Will it be competitive against proprietary Nvidia driver? I don't think so. Imposible goal unless a big number Nvidia engineers get involved in the FOSS drivers.

I see no reasons for NVK not to be able to rival the proprietary NVIDIA drivers. It's already been done once: now Mesa AMD drivers are as fast and sometimes faster than AMD Pro drivers.

NVIDIA GSP makes it possible to use the GPU just as well as the NVIDIA proprietary kernel module can.

And Vulkan leaves very little to drivers unlike OpenGL which has a ton of proprietary voodoo (optimizations, hacks, workarounds, etc).

If you're OK with GSP (yeah, almost an OS by itself) the future of open source NVIDIA is bright.

[jeisom]

It is amazing how much progress they have made over the last year. Now that hard work is baring fruit in what seems like weeks as we weren't exposed to it on a near weekly basis.

GREAT JOB everyone involved!

[jeisom]

And Vulkan leaves very little to drivers unlike OpenGL which has a ton of proprietary voodoo (optimizations, hacks, workarounds, etc).
bright.

I wonder if on Turing+ it might make sense to use zink in the future rather than optimize nouveau for turing+ and focus on vulkan long term. After the vulkan features required are ready that is.

[The the]

GSP on pascal? I don't think so, sir!

[mirmirmir]

Pascal anyone?

[dragon321]

Will it be competitive against proprietary Nvidia driver? I don't think so. Imposible goal unless a big number Nvidia engineers get involved in the FOSS drivers.

Why not? Nouveau performance was blocked by lack of firmware but now thanks to GSP reclocking and other features are not issue anymore and nothing stops it from providing same performance as NVIDIA proprietary driver.

Pascal anyone?

There is experimental support for older GPUs (up to Kepler) in NVK but in Pascal and most Maxwell GPUs it's not really worth it. Without reclocking performance will be bad and it will be unusable for almost anything. Not like Vulkan is great on Pascal even in proprietary driver, NVIDIA started supporting Vulkan properly from Turing.