The Linux community, in collaboration with the company specializing in open source programs, Collabora, has reached a significant milestone in the development of video drivers after months of intense development work. NVK, a new Vulkan-compatible NVIDIA driver for Linux, has been released.
Vulkan is a low-level graphical API (Application Programming Interface) developed by Khronos Group, an open, non-profit organization profitable. It was released in 2016 as a high-performance, low-end alternative to existing graphics APIs such as OpenGL and DirectX.
Until now, Linux users have faced challenges when using NVIDIA graphics cards due to the complexity of installing and updating the company’s official driver. Furthermore, available open source driver solutions were unable to exploit the full video processing potential of NVIDIA cards and were incompatible with key technologies such as Wayland.
NVK emerges as a promising solution for these problems. Compatible with Vulkan 1.3, NVK is capable of delivering exceptional performance and support for a wide range of modern games. Additionally, it is designed to work seamlessly with Wayland, providing a more complete user experience.
Faith Ekstrand, one of the lead developers behind NVK, recently announced that the driver is ready for implementation in Large scale. By eliminating non-conforming implementation warnings and changing the Meson configuration option to NVK, the driver is ready to be integrated into Linux distributions.
Although there is still work to be done, especially regarding supporting D3D11 and D3D12 games, NVK already offers a viable alternative to NVIDIA’s proprietary driver. While performance and features may still not completely match the proprietary driver in some cases, NVK represents a significant advancement for the Linux community.
As more Linux distributions adopt NVK by default, users will be able to enjoy a more functional and integrated experience when using NVIDIA graphics cards on their Linux systems. While the road may still be long, the development of NVK promises to revolutionize the way Linux users interact with NVIDIA hardware.
