Nvidia Vulkan driver for Mesa: Collabora NVK comes to the free graphics stack for Linux

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The British open source developer Collabora based in Cambridge announces a new open source Vulkan graphics driver for graphics cards from Nvidia, which is to be implemented in the free graphics stack Mesa 3D. This should close the big gap to the open source graphics drivers from AMD and Intel.

The globally operating private company Collabora, which originally focused on instant messaging , VoIP and video conferencing technology and meanwhile supports open source projects such as the Linux operating system kernel, the open source multimedia framework GStreamer as well as the Wayland display server protocol and the free office program collection LibreOffice, GeForce graphics cards are equipped with a driver speed up for Vulkan.

The new reference for Nvidia GPUs under Linux

Since Nvidia's efforts in terms of open source are very limited and the free graphics driver Nouveau lacks features, Collabora would like to start here .

Collabora NVK – Vulkan graphics driver for Mesa 3D

  • While state-of-the-art a decade ago, open-source Nouveau drivers have fallen sharply behind in recent years.
  • The current Nouveau driver lacks new hardware support and features that at least compared to the open drivers from AMD and Intel.
  • Jason Ekstrand from Collabora and Karol Herbst and Dave Airlie from Red Hat wrote the new Vulkan graphics driver for Nvidia hardware almost from scratch.< /li>

NVK aims to become the new reference Vulkan driver for Nvidia graphics cards on Linux and will ship with one of the upcoming versions of the Mesa graphics stack.

< p class="p text-width">The unfortunate reality is that while the original Nouveau drivers were written by some truly amazing engineers and were state of the art a decade ago, they have fallen behind in recent years .

Jason Ekstand, Collabora

For this purpose, the experience of Collabora from more than seven years of development should flow into the new Vulkan graphics driver for Mesa, which should lead to a continuously updated driver for GeForce graphics cards under Linux.

One of NVK's goals is for it to become the new reference volcano driver within Mesa. To that end, we're building NVK with all the experience we've developed for Vulkan drivers over the past 7.5 years and trying to keep the code base clean and well-organized.

Jason Ekstand, Collabora

Collabora NVK has been in development for a few months now and already has the basic feature set to support Nvidia graphics cards. Support for Nvidia Turing, Ampere and Ada Lovelace is already available, Kepler, Maxwell and Pascal are also in preparation.

The new one Try the driver already

Users who want to try the new graphics driver now and have a GeForce graphics card based on Turing or Ampere can download the driver themselves from the branch Compile nvk/main in the nouveau/mesa project.

See lead developer Jason Ekstand's post on the Collabora blog for more information.