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

[sarmad]

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.

It certainly makes more sense to just focus on Vulkan and let Zink handle the OpenGL.

[QwertyChouskie]

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.

The Nouveau Gallium driver would need to be refactored to use the new NAK shader compiler rather than the old codegen. Reclocking was one major issue, but the old shader compiler is also a major issue, both for performance and stability (lots of subtle bugs). It just comes down to whether someone does the work or not.

[TheJackiNonster]

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.

"Impossible" is a strong word which I wouldn't use in open-source development. It might take some time to be competitive but given how many people (including developers) have Nvidia GPUs, I would be surprised if those people all simply accept worse performance long term.

[NeoMorpheus]

Ngreedia: We dont care for your needs of proper open source drivers.

Linux peasants (together with the white knights): Its ok Dear Leader Jensen, we will do it for free as a show of our unconditional love!

AMD: scratches head and decide to give up in providing Linux with proper open source driver support and love since its ignored by the community.

[You-]

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.

Not at the start but by the end, definitely (as it will be the only supported path).

In the middle... nvidia drivers were notorious for not keeping their relative performance for past generations against comparable AMD cards, so it will be interesting to see.

[enigmaxg2]

Pascal anyone?

Sadly, it's in no man's land right now probably will be left to rot.

[sarmad]

Ngreedia: We dont care for your needs of proper open source drivers.

Linux peasants (together with the white knights): Its ok Dear Leader Jensen, we will do it for free as a show of our unconditional love!

AMD: scratches head and decide to give up in providing Linux with proper open source driver support and love since its ignored by the community.

AMD is not ignored by the community. Steam survey shows clearly that Linux users prefer AMD, despite AMD failing to convince many laptop manufacturers to put AMD GPUs in their laptops for whatever reason. When I bought my nVidia based laptop few years ago I looked all over the internet for a gaming laptop with nVidia dGPU and I literally only found one, which does come with an AMD dGPU but does NOT come with a web cam believe it or not, and in my case web cam is a must as I need that for work, so I ended up buying an nVidia based laptop. I'm pretty sure there are plenty of Linux users ending up forced to buy nVidia despite preferring AMD.

[Gusar]

AMD: scratches head and decide to give up in providing Linux with proper open source driver support and love since its ignored by the community.

If you're referring to AMDVLK here, it's ignored because of its closed development model - it's developed behind closed doors and then the code is thrown over the wall every two weeks. That's not at all conducive to creating a community.

[timofonic]

Not at the start but by the end, definitely (as it will be the only supported path).

In the middle... nvidia drivers were notorious for not keeping their relative performance for past generations against comparable AMD cards, so it will be interesting to see.

Do you mean when supported cards are not officially supported by Nvidia? Maybe yes then, but newer ones will have issues and proprietary Nvidia driver will be the only one with proper support.

[fong38]

Ngreedia: We dont care for your needs of proper open source drivers.

Linux peasants (together with the white knights): Its ok Dear Leader Jensen, we will do it for free as a show of our unconditional love!

AMD: scratches head and decide to give up in providing Linux with proper open source driver support and love since its ignored by the community.

AMD is definitely not being ignored and any Linux desktop hardware survey involving GPUs will show you that. This is merely a matter of making all hardware vendors viable for those who care about a FOSS stack. On the other hand why do you feel obliged to repeat the exact same in any thread mentioning Nvidia rather than simply moving on to topics you care far more about?