In addition to the RADV driver status update shared recently in Vienna at XDC2025, there was also a presentation on the current status of the NVK driver as the open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver within Mesa that currently targets the Nouveau kernel driver and the Rust-based Nova kernel driver in the future.
Faith Ekstrand of Collabora provided a status update on the NVK driver and the recent generations of NVIDIA hardware support being worked on for this open-source Vulkan driver. Besides getting Blackwell and other GPU support in order, NVK developers have also been ironing out bugs as a result of switching to Zink by default for OpenGL atop Vulkan rather than continuing to develop a Nouveau Gallium3D driver. The switch to using Zink for OpenGL has been hitting some Nouveau kernel driver bugs and various other rendering bugs but should be “working okay”.
NVK has also been working out Vulkan 1.4 features, adding features like cooperative matrix support, and devising plans for more performance. A variety of different initiatives are in the works for working to further enhance the performance of NVK relative to NVIDIA’s official closed-source Vulkan driver.
In many titles NVK is currently around 50% the performance of the official NVIDIA driver:
NVK is also working toward Vulkan Video support for video acceleration as well as Vulkan ray-tracing. For Vulkan ray-tracing on NVIDIA there has been some reverse engineering work but still lacking information on how the shaders operate.
Besides NVK itself, there are more open-source developers needed to also work on the Nouveau / Nova kernel drivers. Faith Ekstrand commented that they are “barely keeping the lights on” with the current development resources.
Embedded above is the NVK status update presentation in full along with the PDF slides.
