COLLABORA announced the introduction of the NVK open driver for NVIDIA video cards for everyday use by users. This driver has been certified by the Khronos consortium, which is involved in the development of graphic standards. The driver has been deemed fully compatible with the Vulkan 1.3 specification, successfully passing all tests from the CTS (Khronos Conformance Test Suite) and has been included in the list of certified drivers.
The certification has been granted for NVIDIA GPUs based on the Turing microarchitecture (GEFORCE GENT TX 16XX, RTX 20XX, and Quadro RTX series), Ampere microarchitecture (GeForce RTX 30xx and RTS series X A2000/4000/5000/6000), and Ada microarchitecture (GeForce RTX 4xxx, RTX 4000 SFF, and RTX 4xxx/5000/6000 ADA series). The validation was performed on the Linux 6.5 and 6.8RC1 core. This certification allows for the official declaration of compatibility with graphic standards and the usage of associated Khronos brands. These changes have been integrated into the MESA code base and will be part of the upcoming Mesa 24.1 release.
Aside from the advancements in NVK, significant progress has been noted in providing OpenGL support for NVIDIA video cards. A change has been accepted in Mesa, allowing the use of the driver zink to support OpenGL 4.6 on systems with newer series of NVIDIA video cards, addressing issues with the standard Nouveau Opengl Diver (NVC0). To enable Zink in Mesa 24.1, simply set the environment variable “nouveau_use_zink = 1”.
The modifications in MESA also enable the usage of ZINK to provide OpenGL support in other drivers as an alternative for GPUs not supported by standard MESA OpenGL drivers. This approach is already being used to support OpenGL in the freedreno driver for Qualcomm Adreno 700 GPUs