NVK¶

NVK is a Vulkan driver for NVIDIA GPUs.

Hardware support¶

NVK currently supports Kepler (GeForce 600 and 700 series) and later GPUs up to and including Blackwell (RTX 5000 series).

Conformance status:¶

NVK is a conformant Vulkan 1.4 implementation for all officially supported GPUs.

OpenGL support through Zink:¶

Starting with Mesa 25.1, all Turing (RTX 2000 series and GTX 16xx) and later GPUs will get NVK+Zink as their OpenGL implementation by default instead of the old Nouveau GL driver. NVK+Zink is a conformant OpenGL 4.6 implementation. The Nouveau GL driver is no longer supported on these cards.

Kernel requirements¶

NVK requires at least a Linux 6.6 kernel

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 pushbufs 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
trash_memory: Write repeating nonzero patterns to client memory allocations
vm: Logs VM binds and unbinds
no_cbuf: Disables automatic promotion of UBOs to constant buffers
edb_bview: Forces the driver to use the VK_EXT_descriptor_buffer path for buffer views.
gart: Forces all memory to be allocated from system RAM (GART)
coherent: Forces all memory maps to be coherent with the CPU caches. This only applies to Tegra devices.

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.