Open-Source NVIDIA Driver Moving To NVK + Zink For OpenGL On Newer GPUs

Mesa 24.1 Git has landed the initial infrastructure for allowing drivers to choose to using Zink instead for OpenGL via this OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation. The motivating factor for this latest Mesa work is for using Zink atop the NVK Vulkan driver for newer NVIDIA GPUs.

Mesa developers are planning on using Zink for OpenGL with newer NVIDIA GPUs given the pace of development of the Mesa NVK Vulkan driver and that reducing the need to continue maintaining the NVC0 Gallium3D driver as part of Nouveau. The effort makes sense given the reduced demand for OpenGL these days, Zink being in great shape for a generic OpenGL implementation, NVK maturing well, and the Nouveau development resources being stretched thin as it is.

This merge adds the infrastructure to allow drivers to choose to use Zink instead of a hardware OpenGL driver. That code was merged yesterday for Mesa 24.1.

As part of that merge is currently commented out code to use Zink by default for GeForce RTX 20 "Turing" GPUs and newer. Eventually that code will be in use for using Zink by default for OpenGL on these recent generations of NVIDIA GPUs. Right now those wanting to try it can use the NOUVEAU_USE_ZINK=1" environment variable added by this latest code.

The open-source NVIDIA driver support continues to improve with the NVIDIA GSP (GPU System Processor) firmware-driven support recently making it into the mainline kernel for the Nouveau driver, the NVK Vulkan driver taking shape and being able to run more games on Linux, etc, but for the near-term the best open-source driver support for gamers and enthusiasts remains with AMD Radeon and Intel Arc Graphics for those wanting mature and performant support using upstream components.