[HN Gopher] NVK reaches Vulkan 1.0 conformance
___________________________________________________________________
NVK reaches Vulkan 1.0 conformance
Author : mfilion
Score : 59 points
Date : 2023-11-20 17:34 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.collabora.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.collabora.com)
| cassianoleal wrote:
| Can anyone ELI5 this for me?
|
| Does this mean NVidia GPUs don't need the proprietary driver
| anymore? Does this put NVidia on par with Radeon via amdgpu/RADV
| regarding OSS Linux support?
| babypuncher wrote:
| I'm not a GPU driver or graphics programmer, so I'll do my
| best. Hopefully someone more knowledgeable can chime in if I
| mess something up.
|
| * Last May, Nvidia open-sourced their proprietary kernel
| module, after moving their proprietary bits into a firmware
| blob that runs on the GPU itself. As is, this module is not
| suitable for being mainlined into the Linux kernel, but acts as
| a starting point for a proper FOSS module.
|
| * Nouveau developers have been able to use code and knowledge
| from the open-sourced Nvidia module to improve their mainlined
| kernel module (more low level hardware access, the ability to
| load said firmware blob, and the ability to control clock
| speeds/power states).
|
| * The improved, actually useful Nouveau has allowed for the
| development of a performant user-space Vulkan driver for Nvidia
| called NVK, which was mainlined into Mesa a few months ago.
|
| * Today's news is that NVK is now Vulkan 1.0 conformant, which
| means properly written apps that use the Vulkan 1.0 featureset
| should work and be performant using Nouveau and NVK/Mesa
| samus wrote:
| > Last May, Nvidia open-sourced their proprietary kernel
| module, after moving their proprietary bits into a firmware
| blob that runs on the GPU itself. As is, this module is not
| suitable for being mainlined into the Linux kernel, but acts
| as a starting point for a proper FOSS module.
|
| There will probably be no new kernel driver. Nouveau can get
| the job done now via the proprietary GSP.
|
| > The improved, actually useful Nouveau has allowed for the
| development of a performant user-space Vulkan driver for
| Nvidia called NVK, which was mainlined into Mesa a few months
| ago.
|
| It's faster now, but still slow as a brick. A lot of
| optimization work is required, but I guess the developers
| will focus on reaching conformance with more Vulkan versions.
| By implementing some additional extensions, modern OpenGL
| versions and OpenCL can then run via Zink and RustiCL. This
| will make the driver actually useful, hopefully attract
| users, and help to find bugs and optimization opportunities.
| Eventually, a native OpenGL driver [edit: actually a Mesa
| State Tracker] might be required since Zink has a lot of
| overhead.
| fbdab103 wrote:
| What is slow in this case? 1% of the NVidia driver
| performance or 70%? I could stomach some hit to performance
| to drop the binary blob.
| cwillu wrote:
| Can they reclock the memory and processing cores to the rated
| speeds, voltages to the rated voltages, and fans to the
| speeds that prevent things from melting? That's been _the_
| stumbling block for a long time, although maybe that's
| changed in the last year or two.
| fayalalebrun wrote:
| Yes, this is indeed a replacement for the proprietary driver.
| However, Vulkan 1.0 is the most basic version of Vulkan. Right
| now we are at 1.3, plus there are many Vulkan extensions which
| need to be implemented aside from the core version.
|
| In other words, this is a good start, but with only Vulkan 1.0
| you won't be able to use something like DXVK, for running
| DirectX games with Proton/Wine.
| fbdab103 wrote:
| For what it is worth, the blog post claims that 1.3
| compatibility is not too far away, "We're not very far off
| from being able to advertise Vulkan 1.3 but it's all compiler
| work between here and there."
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-11-20 23:00 UTC)