For those out of the loop that don’t read articles (this isn’t an article it’s a post by one of the creator’s of the driver)
What is NVK?
NVK is a new fully open-source Vulkan driver for Nvidia hardware.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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For those out of the loop that don’t read articles (this isn’t an article it’s a post by one of the creator’s of the driver)
What is NVK?
NVK is a new fully open-source Vulkan driver for Nvidia hardware.
What is the difference between selecting dx12 and vulkan on a game that supports both versus putting a vulkan driver on the card? Will the vulkan drive have better performance on games which already support vulkan? All games? Thanks for any explanation
If you're on Linux Vulkan is the way to go. Unless their use of the standard is really bad, Vulkan will always perform better on Linux than DirectX 12
If you're on Windows, then it can be a bit of a crap shoot on which one performs better.
Dx12 is absolutely proprietary. Vulkan is open source.
Vulkan isn't open source, it's an open standard.
Open source, open standard same stuff.
No, its not. With open source software you, a regular person, can feasibly get a change included into the code base. That is NOT true with an open standard. You, or more accurately a very large and powerful company you work with or for, have to have significant pull to even hope to get a change in. Even then, those changes take a lot of time to proliferate.
With open source code that change can happen as soon as you write it, you don't even have to wait for the maintainer to merge it; just fork the software. You can't really "fork" Vulkan as a normal dev; no one will follow your spec. You don't have enough pull as a single dev to get billion dollar companies to follow it. But you can relatively easily get those same companies to use your fork of an open source software.
They are entirely different systems.
"I will prove you wrong and fork vulkan and make everyone use my version " that's what i would've d Said if i was some genius who knew how to code but am not. Joke aside, i meant in terms of openness. You can't make dx12 work on linux, android,etc but vulkan works everywhere.
That is because it's an open standard, not open source. You can read the documentation and implement a driver for a new platform, but you're not porting vulkan to it. Likewise, there is tons of windows only open source code that will never work anywhere else because they target windows specific code.
I know what an open standard is (i hope ) from watching Andreas kling code his from scratch browser "ladybird". Posix is one. Html , css, js too. Basically, anything that give you specs and let you implement them. I know wine try to implement (reverse engineer) the windows syscalls to make windows apps work on linux down to the weird quirks and bugs.
If you run dx12 on Linux. You're likely going to be using a translation letter that converts dx12 to vulkan.
I have no idea sorry
That article doesn't mention Wayland and I don't have Nvidia card myself. So, can I go now and suggest Nvidia owners to use Wayland if their Mesa, Vulkan and Nouveau are up to date?
Even if the users were using a kernel tree that isn't even in Linus' tree yet in addition to bleeding-edge Mesa, you still shouldn't be using nor recommending this.
From the article:
It will take a long time before we get the bugs worked out and get a full feature set with reasonable performance.
We are not, however, yet to the point where you can run an arbitrary app and expect it to work properly.
However, right now there are enough missing features and known issues that a lot of apps won't work and we already know that. Please don't file "XYZ game doesn't play" issues just yet.
This is a large step forward but nowhere near usable for the wider Linux gamer audience yet and that's just the Vulkan driver.
Other parts of Nouveau aren't too great either and there is still no re-clocking support. Your iGPU is likely faster than any card with NVK right now.
Probably not yet as the gsp firmware loading that would allow full performance is not included in these patches and these patches will requires linux 6.6 to work at all while 6.4 is the current release.
I actually came to this community to actually ask about the state of Wayland on NVIDIA lol. I have a laptop that has hybrid AMD/NVIDIA graphics and I want to FULLY switch to Wayland but it NEEDS to be stable enough to not cause issues while I'm working.
I have a 1060 and use proprietary drivers. On sway I sometimes have smal graphics glitches that go away when I hover them with my mouse. On Hyprland with the nvidia build I have experienced no problems.
I'm brave running Plasma on Wayland with Nvidia and it mostly works too. I have the same glitches and things as well.
I'm on a laptop with hybrid Nvidia/Intel graphics, and Wayland has been working fine for me. I typically run in "on-demand" mode, but I've used both strictly Intel and strictly Nvidia modes as well, and it's been fine.
I think the only real issue I've had is that Splitgate refuses to launch in Wayland, so I switch to X if I want to play - general computing works fine, native apps have had no issues, and all the other games I've played have launched without issue.
The Nvidia GPU is a 1650 TI, and I'm on the Nvidia 535 driver.
I have used Wayland on NVIDIA for couple of years now. It's not perfect, but generally it's usable and I haven't used X11 after I switched. My current issues are probably more from applications not supporting Wayland, because XWayland can cause some annoyances when using programs through it.
Does this improve performance with nouveau then? Last time I tried nouveau it was leagues slower than integrated graphics, let alone the proprietary drivers