NVK, RADV, & Other Mesa Drivers Ready With Launch Day Vulkan 1.4 Support

Years ago when new OpenGL spec releases would occur, it could take months or years for the open-source Mesa drivers to catch-up in supporting the latest versions... Thankfully in the Vulkan space it continues to prove to be a very different story. As we've seen with prior Vulkan specs, today's Vulkan 1.4 spec release is greeted by same-day Mesa patches.

Thanks to hardware vendors being more interested/committed to Linux graphics driver support these days, more Mesa developers actively engaged with the Vulkan working group, Vulkan being much cleaner than OpenGL, and similar benefits, the turnaround time for modern Mesa Vulkan drivers remaining in-step with new Vulkan spec updates is lightning fast in comparison to the old Mesa OpenGL days.

Already merged within minutes of the Vulkan 1.4 embargo lift is Vulkan 1.4 support within the open-source NVIDIA "NVK" driver. Faith Ekstrand with engaging in the Vulkan working group was able to provide this same-day support for Vulkan 1.4 within the open-source NVIDIA driver.

There is also a pending merge request for Vulkan 1.4 support with the Radeon RADV driver. RADV driver is Vulkan 1.4 conformant on many AMD GPUs from GFX8 through GFX11.5 (RDNA3.5) hardware. That RADV Vulkan 1.4 support was spearheaded by Samuel Pitoiset of the Valve Linux graphics team. That RADV Vulkan 1.4 support should be merged shortly.

The smaller TURNIP (Qualcomm Adreno 700 series) and Honeykrisp (Apple Silicon) drivers also have open merge requests for Vulkan 1.4 support in Mesa.

There is also an open Vulkan 1.4 pull request for the Intel ANV driver as well.

Over on the proprietary side, there is a NVIDIA Vulkan 1.4 driver beta for Linux and Windows systems. For the AMD packaged driver stack so far I haven't seen any Vulkan 1.4 driver available yet.