Mesa NVK Vulkan Driver Now Declared Vulkan 1.3 Conformant, Mesa 24.1 To Build By Default

It's a big day today in the open-source NVIDIA Nouveau/NVK space... The Mesa NVK driver is now officially declared a Vulkan 1.3 conformant implementation by the Khronos Group! In turn the NVK driver is no longer considered experimental and with Mesa 24.1 will build by default for x86/x86_64-based installations.

On Khronos.org the newest entries today are for the NVK driver being Vulkan 1.3 conformant from the latest NVIDIA RTX 40 GPUs and other Ada GPUs back through the RTX 30 / Ada GPUs and also RTX 20 / Turing GPUs. This is via the X.Org Foundation with Software in the Public Interest (SPI) being the stated vendor.

Mesa Git paired with Linux 6.8 Git is passing all the necessary Vulkan 1.3 conformance test suite (CTS) tests that The Khronos Group has acknowledged NVK as a conformant Vulkan 1.3 implementation. Linux 6.8 is critical on the Nouveau kernel driver side for the NVIDIA GSP firmware support to achieve better performance although your mileage may vary.

With that said, this merge request hitting Mesa 24.1-devel a few minutes ago proclaims NVK a "a real Vulkan driver now."

That change renames the Meson driver option from "nouveau-experimental" to "nouveau" in the list of available Vulkan drivers to build. It also drops the non-conformant Vulkan API warnings when using this driver on NVIDIA Turing through NVIDIA Ada GPUs. Congrats to all those continuing to work on this open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver within Mesa. Mesa 24.1 will be out next quarter with all the latest NVK driver improvements.