Open-source Vulkan driver NVK gains experimental DLSS support
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NVK, the community-built open-source Vulkan driver for Nvidia GPUs in Mesa, has gained experimental DLSS support, with the code landing in Mesa 26.2-devel, as reported by Phoronix.
Key facts
NVK began in 2022 as a from-scratch Vulkan driver led by Collabora's Faith Ekstrand alongside Karol Herbst and Dave Airlie at Red Hat, and it supports Turing (RTX 20-series and GTX 16-series)
In late 2024, it became the first open-source Vulkan driver for Nvidia hardware to pass Khronos conformance, reaching Vulkan 1.4 provisional spec
NVK, the community-built open-source Vulkan driver for Nvidia GPUs in Mesa, has gained experimental DLSS support, with the code landing in Mesa 26.2-devel, as reported by Phoronix
The catch is the reliance on pre-compiled binaries; NVK can only run DLSS where compatible bytecode already exists for the GPU in use
Summary
DLSS runs on NVK through VK_NVX_binary_import, a Vulkan extension that lets an application load Nvidia CuBIN files, the pre-baked CUDA binaries Nvidia, and loads them on the GPU. The catch is the reliance on pre-compiled binaries; NVK can only run DLSS where compatible bytecode already exists for the GPU in use. Support for DLSS across the broader Linux graphics stack has been uneven, to say the least. NVK began in 2022 as a from-scratch Vulkan driver led by Collabora's Faith Ekstrand alongside Karol Herbst and Dave Airlie at Red Hat, and it supports Turing (RTX 20-series and GTX 16-series) and newer architectures.