NVK Open-Source NVIDIA Vulkan Driver Progresses On Running Some Games

Faith Ekstrand today published a blog post outlining recent efforts around NVK, the open-source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA hardware developed namely by the Nouveau development community. Some recent highlights include:

- Getting Maxwell and Kepler GPU support restored for the NVK driver. Granted, GTX 900 Maxwell hardware is in a tough spot for lacking re-clocking support for desktop GPUs and also not having the GPU System Processor (GSP) firmware introduced in the RTX 2000 series.

- Continued work on geometry shaders, tessellation shaders, and transform feedback support.

- A few games have begun working on NVK such as Hollow Knight and F1 2017.

- A wide variety of Vulkan extensions have been implemented in recent months. NVK is nearing the point of being able to expose Vulkan 1.2 or possibly Vulkan 1.3 isn't too far out.

- Work is still ongoing around the Vulkan driver performance.

- There is work underway on a new back-end compiler called NAK for the "NVIDIA Awesome Kompiler". This Mesa back-end compiler is being written in Rust.

There remains no concrete timeline for upstreaming NVK in Mesa, but will happen at roughly the same time that the new Nouveau kernel driver code is mainlined in the Linux kernel. The Nouveau DRM kernel driver changes offer a new and improved user-space API plus the GSP integration work to allow for better performance on the RTX 20 series and newer.

Ekstrand's post in full can be read over on the Collabora blog.