NVK¶

NVK is a Vulkan driver for NVIDIA GPUs.

Hardware support¶

NVK currently supports Maxwell (some GTX 700 and 800 series, most 900 series) and later GPUs up to and including Ada (RTX 4000 series). Support for Kepler (GeForce 600 and 700 series) and Blackwell (RTX 5000 series) is currently in-progress but incomplete.

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.

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
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.