Mesa’s NVK Vulkan driver had been Vulkan 1.4 conformant for Turing and newer GPUs, but now with Mesa 25.2-devel it’s Vulkan 1.4 conformant going back to Maxwell GPUs. This change is exported to be back-ported to the upcoming Mesa 25.1 release as well for those interested in using this open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver.
NVK lead developer Faith Ekstrand landed this merge today to Mesa Git advertising Vulkan 1.4 conformance for NVIDIA Maxwell GPUs. Ekstrand commented:
“This advertises Vulkan 1.4 conformance for Maxwell+ GPUs as well as enabling Vulkan on them by default.
Maxwell A conformance results posted this on the Khronos website this morning. The others should post over the week-end. I’ll merge once they all show up and then we can backport to 25.1. 25.1 already has all the patches for working Vulkan. It just needs the one-line enable.”
A nice milestone to celebrate while the RTX 50 Blackwell bring-up is still ongoing for NVK as the very latest NVIDIA GPUs.
NVIDIA Maxwell includes the GeForce GTX 900 series graphics cards as well as the GeForce 800M mobile GPUs and GeForce GTX 750 / 750 Ti graphics cards. This NVK driver use goes along with the Nouveau kernel driver as the ongoing development around the NOVA kernel driver is ultimately targeting only the Turing GPUs and newer due to the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP) dependencie.
Making the GeForce GTX 750 series interesting for open-source users with Nouveau + NVK is still the ability to easily re-clock those graphics cards as the “Maxwell 1” parts are the last NVIDIA GPUs not requiring signed firmware images.
This change also enables Vulkan 1.4 for the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1000 “Pascal” GPUs and the the Volta-based TITAN V while it’s the Turing and newer GPUs that already were treated as conformant. This is a nice milestone for those still using these aging NVIDIA graphics cards and wanting to avoid using the packaged NVIDIA driver stack.
