From what I understand (as an AMD user), NVK is a driver that aims to allow users to achieve the same level of support and performance as they would get with the proprietary Nvidia driver. If that is the case, does that mean Wayland on Nvidia can finally be as good as it is on AMD? If so, then 2024 can pave the way to complete Wayland transition and full Wayland support for all uses, including Gaming, and for all hardware, including Nvidia GPUs. If that happens, 2025 will be (I’m sorry, I know it’s a meme at this point) the year of the Linux desktop.
We currently support Turing (RTX 20XX and GTX 16XX) and later GPUs. We plan to eventually support hardware as far back as Kepler (GeForce 600 and 700 series) but those are currently poorly tested at best and missing a few essential features.
NVK is a Vulkan driver while nouveau is an OpenGL driver. If I understand correctly there’s also a nouveau kernel module which interfaces with the userspace nouveau, but NVK might use another API. [1]
Apparently this is a new driver which uses the open source headers and Linux kernel modules from nVidia’s proprietary drivers, and it doesn’t borrow very much from nouveau driver because that one has different names for things in their headers due to the clean room reverse engineering aspect of nouveau. Although I am not an expert on this so I could be wrong.
collabora.com
Hot