Nouveau With NVK Vulkan Driver Running More Games, Increasing Feature Set

Collabora's Faith Ekstrand provided a status update yesterday at XDC 2024 Montreal around the state of the Nouveau kernel driver with the Mesa NVK Vulkan driver as a means of open-source Vulkan API support on NVIDIA GPUs.

Faith touched on Red Hat's Nova kernel driver as the effort toward a Rust-based, GSP-using from-scratch NVIDIA kernel graphics driver that remains under development. But for now NVK use is best done with the upstream Nouveau kernel driver.

The NVK driver is Vulkan 1.3 conformant, many more Vulkan extensions have been added over the past year, and the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver is also working atop NVK.

Many games are running atop this open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver including Horizon: Zero Dawn, Cyberpunk 2077, X4 Foundations, Transport Fever 2, Rust, Return to Monkey Island, The Witness, Evil Genius 2, and many others.

Those wishing to learn more about the late-2024 state of the NVK Vulkan driver within Mesa can find Ekstrand's presentation from XDC 2024 embedded below along with the PDF slides.