The Mesa 25.2 release that will likely be out as stable in August should have nice initial support for the newest NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, namely used by the GeForce RTX 50 series, with the NVK open-source driver for Vulkan usage.
As previously covered on Phoronix, the Nouveau driver for Linux 6.16 adds Blackwell support in initial form. Since then the Mesa NVK Vulkan driver has been landing its Blackwell enablement bits. It looks like for the Mesa 25.2 release up next, that NVIDIA Blackwell support should be pretty decent for those wanting to use this open-source driver stack on NVIDIA’s newest wares. For those in need of OpenGL, as previously mentioned, Nouveau has adopted a Zink preference for leveraging OpenGL-on-Vulkan rather than continuing to work on their NVC0 Gallium3D hardware driver.
Red Hat engineer David Airlie who worked on the Blackwell NVK support wrote a rare blog post today to elaborate on the effort. Airlie explained:
“I’ve spent time over the last month enabling Blackwell support on NVK, the Mesa vulkan driver for NVIDIA GPUs. Faith from Collabora, the NVK maintainer has cleaned up and merged all the major pieces of this work and landed them into mesa this week. Mesa 25.2 should ship with a functioning NVK on blackwell. The code currently in mesa main passes all tests in the Vulkan CTS.”
All the basics of the NVK Blackwell support are in place but there is still room for more performance optimizations. Bound texture support hasn’t yet landed nor is there proper instruction scheduling. But they are being worked on so we’ll see if they get wrapped up before the Mesa 25.2 code branching in the coming weeks.
Once the NVK Blackwell support settles I’ll be working on some comparison benchmarks for the GeForce RTX 50 series against the official NVIDIA Linux driver.
