NVK

NVK is a Vulkan driver for Nvidia GPUs.

Hardware support

NVK currently supports Turing (RTX 20XX and GTX 16XX) and later GPUs. Eventually, we plan to support as far back as Kepler (GeForce 600 and 700 series) GPUs but anything pre-Turing is currently disabled by default.

Kernel requirements

NVK requires at least a Linux 6.6 kernel

Conformance status:

NVK is a conformant Vulkan 1.3 implementation for all Turing (RTX 20XX and GTX 16XX) and later GPUs.

Debugging

Here are a few environment variable debug environment variables specific to NVK:

NAK_DEBUG

a comma-separated list of named flags affecting the NVK back-end shader compiler:

print

Prints the shader at various stages of the compile pipeline

serial

Forces serial instruction execution; this is often useful for debugging or working around dependency bugs

spill

Forces the GPR file to a minimal size to test the spilling code

annotate

Adds extra annotation instructions to the IR to track information from various compile passes

NVK_DEBUG

a comma-separated list of named flags, which do various things:

push

Dumps all pusbufs to stderr on submit. This requires that push_sync also be set.

push_sync

Waits for submit to complete before continuing

zero_memory

Zeros all VkDeviceMemory objects upon creation

vm

Logs VM binds and unbinds

no_cbuf

Disables automatic promotion of UBOs to constant buffers

NVK_I_WANT_A_BROKEN_VULKAN_DRIVER

If defined to 1 or true, this will enable enumeration of all GPUs Kepler and later, including GPUs for which hardware support is poorly tested or completely broken. This is intended for developer use only.

Hardware Documentation

What little documentation we have can be found in the NVIDIA open-gpu-doc repository. The majority of our documentation comes in the form of class headers which describe the class state registers.