Yet more feature code continues piling in for the Mesa 25.2 release due out next month and days ahead of the feature freeze. Hitting Mesa Git this evening is now treating NVIDIA Kepler GPUs as Vulkan 1.2 conformant following the Vulkan 1.2 CTS passing with the NVK open-source driver paired with the Nouveau kernel driver.
With some exceptions, Kepler is predominantly the aging NVIDIA GeForce GTX 600 and GTX 700 series (sans the GeForce GTX 750 series as Maxwell 1). The other Kepler being some GeForce GT 800M/900M parts for laptops plus various Quadro “K” graphics cards and the Quadro 410.
NVIDIA Kepler GPUs are already treated as “legacy” by the NVIDIA Linux driver and Maxwell and Pascal are heading that way too in the next branch. For those wishing to still enjoy upstream Linux distributions and not wanting to worry about the NVIDIA legacy series, the Kepler NVK support continues getting into good shape. Plus with Kepler GPUs on the Nouveau DRM kernel driver you don’t need to use any signed firmware and this open-source NVIDIA driver is able to re-clock the GPU for better performance unlike the later Maxwell parts.
Faith Ekstrand of Collabora just landed the patch now treating Kepler GPUs as Vulkan 1.2 conformant in Mesa Git ahead of the Mesa 25.2 branching. This follows the Vulkan 1.2 CTS submissions to Khronos (1 and 2) for officially confirming the support. Up to now only the Maxwell 1 and newer NVIDIA GPUs were conformant on the NVK open-source driver.
In case you missed it the other day I ran some fresh Mesa NVK vs. NVIDIA driver benchmarks on the latest Mesa Git code at the time. That was with the newer Ampere RTX 40 GPUs while if time allows I’ll run some fresh Kepler benchmarks soon for Mesa 25.2, granted not too many of the modern Vulkan games can run well on the aging GeForce GTX 600/700 series hardware.
