What does this mean? Practically, it means that we can pass the entire Vulkan conformance test suite.
There will still be bugs, of course, but those bugs are likely to be app-specific.
One step closer for the FOSS drivers to be a real alternative.
Next goal then would be vulkan 1.3 such that DXVK would work.
I’ve been hearing about this a lot. How would this NVK relate to nouveau driver?
NVK is a Vulkan driver while nouveau is an OpenGL driver. If I understand correctly there’s also a nouveau kernel module which interfaces with the userspace nouveau, but NVK might use another API. [1]
[1] https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/introducing-nvk.html
Apparently this is a new driver which uses the open source headers and Linux kernel modules from nVidia’s proprietary drivers, and it doesn’t borrow very much from nouveau driver because that one has different names for things in their headers due to the clean room reverse engineering aspect of nouveau. Although I am not an expert on this so I could be wrong.
How far back will the NVK driver support?
What hardware does NVK support?
We currently support Turing (RTX 20XX and GTX 16XX) and later GPUs. We plan to eventually support hardware as far back as Kepler (GeForce 600 and 700 series) but those are currently poorly tested at best and missing a few essential features.
https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/nvk-has-landed.html