Mesa's NVIDIA Vulkan Driver "NVK" Now Exposes Vulkan 1.3 Support

[sarmad]

Can't wait to see some benchmarks.

[Rccero]

Hopefully the Kepler support (last that had reckoning etc) comes before the discontinuation of 400-series driver patches for it.

(honestly should have been supported in 500-series drivers. Dropping it was a low blow)

I wish it also covered Fermi.
It's an old architecture, but many decade-old laptops are still alive with a Fermi GPUs inside, like my mine (Geforce 820M or GF117).
I rarely use it, I have a better laptop... but I would love to be able to use the full power of the dGPU in the latest linux kernel (nouveau can't compare)

[rabcor]

I'd give it a year or two from now before NVIDIA needs to start worrying that endusers don't install their binary userspace driver any longer because nouveau and nvk are providing a decent experience.
By then only DLSS, Cuda and AI proprietary stuff will require their blobs.

And we have FSR and OpenCL without them still, but nvenc is pretty important too.

[mmstick]

It will be just in time for the COSMIC Desktop, as all of our applications default to Vulkan for rendering.

[Eirikr1848]

I wish it also covered Fermi.
It's an old architecture, but many decade-old laptops are still alive with a Fermi GPUs inside, like my mine (Geforce 820M or GF117).
I rarely use it, I have a better laptop... but I would love to be able to use the full power of the dGPU in the latest linux kernel (nouveau can't compare)

The Fermi Lore is that NVIDIA stated it was *technically* capable of Vulkan support but they did not have the installed user base to warrant it due to the massive Kepler upgrade cycle or something.

Counterarguments were that Kepler was just *such* a leap that everyone pre-Fermi upgraded, new people got involved, TechTubers started becoming a thing, PC building started its ascent, and that NVIDIA just decided to abandon those cards with lower VRAM, higher power etc etc.

This being said: Vulkan would be beneficial for any older card today for older, lighter games etc

[Eirikr1848]

Wait now. With ZLUDA and RUSTICL + NVK does that mean we could have… CUDA on proprietary-driver dropped GPUs?!