This year will be the year of breaking every single preconceived idea on Linux world.

As a current Nvidia user: I'd really love if Nvidia actually went and contributed to the NVK driver officially. NVK has made incredible strides, but the Nvidia engineers are probably in one of the best positions of knowing their own hardware and how to speak to it

Ideally, they start supporting things by market share. According to the stream hardware survey, the most used GPU is the 3060, at ~5% of the market. Followed, weirdly, by 1650 and 1060, then by laptop 3060. Those 4, alone, are about 18% of the market.

0:07: You had one option until 2015: NVIDIA. Then suddenly in 2015, AMD open sourced their driver and the rest is history. The tables turned.

Frametimes is the important statistic, the lower they are = higher FPS and consistency = smooth / no stutter

2023 was such an incredible year for linux desktop, can't wait to see what 2024 brings!

What I'm really excited for is the idea of Vulkan being a universal graphics API with translation layers handling everything else. People are already aware of DXVK handling Direct3D, but I also want to give props to Zink (OpenGL -> Vulkan). Since Vulkan is already on Android natively, and on MacOS and iOS via MoltenVK, I think it's only a matter of time until fully fledged AAA games can run on anything. Run well? Probably not. But run at all? We may as well turn every game ever released into Doom.

1:00 On older cards, it does work and works quite well actually. On newer cards, the main thing that doesn't work is the ability to change the clock speed. It was stuck at the lowest clock speed because of said signed firmware. But yeah, nvidia later introduced gsp firmware, and Collabora and Red Hat worked on NVK that took advantage of it.

it's not suprising vulkan have a lot less overhead, the blob contain a lot of quirks for games that the publisher couldn't bother to fix and other cruft.

Btw, OpenGL will work fine as well because they'll be using Zink which is an OpenGL implementation atop Vulkan.

as a 1080 user, I feel sad to know I basically just missed the mark on being in the new GPU bracket. I wish they would bring support to this too

Hilarious timing considering I just spent all day today dealing with visual artifacts on my laptop and just installed the proprietary drivers before starting this vid lol

NVK and Nouveau have an eye searingly bright future :O I never thought that this would happen so quickly.

That's great news.The question is will DLSS also work at some point or not since it's the only noteworthy thing about nvidia these days lol.

2027, the year of the linux desktop

Just hope that *bsd(especially openbsd) will begin to implement nouveau, then feature parity between amd and nvidia shall be realized

This is indeed huge because it will give Nvidia users another alternative if some of the users are having issues installing the proprietary Nvidia driver because there can be issues with that.

Do you plan to upload your videos to peertube as well?

I was thinking about trading my RTX 2060 with a AMD card but re-clocking support will be a game changer for me. I will finally be able to play Morrowind at more than 20 FPS with water reflections and shadows enabled

Right now the main reason (and frankly the only reason) I buy Nvidia is CUDA. Many professional workloads (e.g. CFD simulations) work on CUDA and nothing else. So this all is nice but unfortunately is not actually useful for me. Since Nvidia open sourcing CUDA drivers is as likely as them giving away cards for free, my hope is that they will work with the NVK team and release a "CUDA add-on driver", so that everyone can use NVK and those who need it can enable CUDA by adding a binary blob.

I think the nouveau driver have a lot of small glitches that will take time to correct. Some deadlocks, some IOMMU errors, some memory errors in the GPU causing timeouts, etc. I think people will try the new NVK drivers but will see freezes and no one will be able to explain those freezes. Hopefully, having more people report bugs will help correct them... I hope.

The most important aspect is, that Nvidia cannot just squeeze some crappy update into the blob and "make" a card obsolete by making it perform worse than before, because there is an alternative. I am not that interested in it yet, but it's super amazing to see such progress.

I'm deeply thankful to these developers making good open software for all people, in this case for those with NVIDIA cards for one reason or another (this included me until a bit ago, because I simply didn't know about these troubles when I made the purchase of my 1660Ti years ago), but I still feel as (Linux... or not necessarily even) consumers we should vote with our wallets. AMD has had its issues (as most companies really), but NVIDIA has not only being contempt with open-source/free (I know these terms mean different things but the behavior is the same towards both) software communities, but also the scummy practices with the mining peak, where they had even gotten into legal issues for not reporting how much cards were going into gaming vs mining,(If I recall that meant their investors were lied to and of course they would sue). And not only their Linux proprietary drivers have a lot of issues, (as another comment said the proprietary drivers were they only way to make them run decent, whereas with NVK and Nouveau they have the possibility to run great) but even the Windows drivers have had and have a ton of issues as well: I know of crashes or high CPU usage of the NVIDIA control panel (and it restarting even if you stop the process with task manager), updates breaking certain things on games, GeForce Experience requiring a sing-up for your data to obtain up to date drivers automatically (the other option I guess would be to go to the website manually, which is not a great experience. and I don't even know if the installer lets you update that way), whereas the AMD equivalent (AMD Adrenaline) doesn't require sing-up. And lets not mention the amazing stories of the Linux kernel nvidia c..... well I don't want the comment to be erased, I'm sure you all know what we are talking about. Wasting the time of kernel devs to keep nvidia from being a nuisance. The taste is bittersweet, because I feel NVIDIA is going to benefit from the free work of developers indirectly with more purchases if they work on linux, and even directly if NVK and Nouveau have an MIT license as you said in the video. I personally don't think they deserve my money if they can't be bothered to collaborate with open-source/free software community, and even make their work harder at times. And in terms of Linux support, I was surprised that, when I bought a Ryzen 5 or an AM5 motherboard (I can't remember) I was gifted a game, but it needed an AMD verification tool to check if you own the products before giving you the game key. I was mentally prepared to use a Windows VM or something similar... but to my surprise, there was a download link for the Linux version for it. It was a script instead of a GUI, (but honestly for portability with GTK/QT etc, in my opinion it's better), and indeed, after examining the script, it just reads /sys stuff and then forwards them to the server with a token. And I got my game without need to use Windows. Of course, I am not going to judge or be angry at anyone for the products they buy, but... in my case, I changed to an AMD GPU when I bought my PC a few months ago, it performs great... and I'm not looking back to NVIDIA unless their direction changes for the best in these regards, even if I could get a bit more performance for the same money if I went with them. And I encourage other users, not even of Linux, PC consumers in general to think about it, even if they end up buying NVIDIA for any reason. I really hope Intel ups their game too, since well... AMD could just stop being good for Linux and any time and we'll be out of good options all over again.

I'm pretty excited about this so we can get a gamescope that doesn't freaking break every other proprietary driver update, but the big question marks are DLSS and RTX. Performance is great, but that's not the only thing that's gonna need focus. If they can get DLSS and RTX working on NVK, or at least a way to easily swap between proprietary blobs and a sufficiently advanced NVK on the fly, that's gonna be amazing.

eBPF is the magical thing here. GPU wise you are looking for architecture, number choice, and all sorts of things that influences the task you are applying the GPU.

Massive W for linux

HDR, color profile support and Wayland's full Wine support are going to land too

is it possible to use both nvk and cuda or can you only do one or the other?

I am pretty new to linux .. yes I am typing from my brand-spanking-new fedora 39 install ... from a few HOURS ago. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't nouveau the OSS driver? Does this mean that NVK will replace nouveau itself, or just the vulkan subsystem? How are they doing this? Does this not require signed stuff with nvidia keys? Did the overlords at nvidia grant something that makes this possible? I'd love to educate myself so please do point me to videos where I can! What do I look for? That explains the differences? I am already looking at what each thing is, but I'd appreciate any pointers ❤

Never underestimate Nvidia to break the open source drivers with next generation and put in even more hurdles. I keep it with Linus Torvalds comment on Nvidia: " F$%/ you Nvidia!".

9:30 the number of VR games on there. How long ago was this? And they still don't have reprojection stable enough to be usable.

Hoping they get some good support for older cards (my laptop uses 1050). I would love to use open source NVIDIA driver on that thing. Been using Nouveau on it for a while and it works great other than gaming.

nvidia has opensource drivers aswell , the binary blob that is required still is only the firmware... and that is the same for amd, also needs a firmware blob, even your wifi card needs a "proprietary" firmware blob (with exception of the ath9k wifi cards , they have a firmware blob you can build yourrself if you really want to, but most just use the proprietary anyway so)

The problem with these drivers is how many proprietary technologies they have like DLSS, their ray tracing implementation Any real reason to use Nvidia over AMD will problem be very long ways away from being in the open source driver, sure you could use FSR and VLK_RAYTRACING but at that point why not just get an AMD GPU which can use the samd things and has an open source driver?

Im happy for those who will be able to take advantage of it, Im kinda stuck at that odd middle ground of new enough to be very usable still but old enough that NVK isnt working on my generation >.< But maybe in the future.. (GTX Titan X for those wondering)

Am I right in assuming that the drivers that came with my System76 laptop with an Nvidia GPU are the binary blob versions?

I want to intervene for a moment. Using proprietary drivers with Nvidia was not the solution to have a good experience. Because there was none. It was necessary to get a decent performance, but there was lot of annoyances and other problems. And I used Nvidia ever since the GTX 750 Ti. I learned my lesson and won't buy any Nvidia card anymore.

I am currently on Windows right now but have a 4090, should I switch to Linux now or wait a little?

Is the (kind of mild) screen tearing all over the place a thing on later generations of cards? On 10xx cards with the proprietary NVIDIA driver there is screen tearing in games, when watching a video or even just moving windows around. Has there been any progress on fixing this with open drivers or otherwise?

My only question is can I do video encoding? I.E. Davinci Resolve on linux basically requires Nvidia for the proprietary drivers. If it can do that and have good encoding for Streaming, NVK will completely replace my entire need for proprietary drivers on Nvidia

Just a few days ago an update broke my proprietary drivers and I decided fuck it back to nouveau I had forgotten how bad the performance was but decided to leave it since I dial boot anyways very glad to hear that we’re actually making progress on that front!! Bit unfortunate that my secondary pc with a 1080 is gonna be legacy already but can’t win them all xD

does this mean we can finally get a wlroots compositor like hyprland without glitches and also properly supporting display out on (nvidia) laptops?

I currently have a RX5500 which is fine, but I would like an upgrade. Newer AMD GPUs use more power, which is a nogo in Denmark because the electricity is really pricey.. so, I looked at a nvidia 4060 which uses less power and performs way better. However, Im currently on Wayland, and Im not sure how well nvidia works with wayland.. so, Ill wait until NVK is working well and nvidia works with wayland :) Didnt know about nvk before I saw this video though. You are really producing a lot of great content!

I'm so fucking stoked for this for my Oryx Pro. Might actually try Arch on it again

The year of the Linux desktop?

So my 2018 Predator with GTX 1060 is thrash?

What about the intel cards? Are those drivers any good on linux yet?

This is good news especially for SteamOS 3 ISO for DIY or OEM. I think the reason why Valve not releasing SteamOS 3 for every device is because Nvidia GPU, but if this FOSS driver keep improving I can see SteamOS 3 DIY Beta is out soon maybe 3-6 months.

Imagine, foss Vulkan, zink OpenGL (and maybe rusticl's opencl): OOTB Nvidia experience everywhere!! Then we can perhaps cofine userspace part for cuda and nvenv in flatpak runtimes: a clean non-tainted system with all the features!

ok, this may be a dumb question and a long way of asking, but i don't know much about drivers. i use vulkan and i can hardly play anything without crashing, and installing the nvidia ones breaks wayland for me. can i just install the driver mentioned in the video from the package manager and reboot?

Aren’t the drivers now better because of them moving more stuff in the firmware which we can’t touch s it’s signed?

Does hardware encoding/decoding work in nouveau?

The hardware serves the OS, not the other way around. I want to use linux therefore i buy AMD. *If* the experience gets good with Nvidia, then fine, i'll cross that bridge when we get there. At the same time, given Nvidia's recent track record (designing shit 12pin connectors, price gouging, etc). So long as AMD can satisfy my needs, it's likely i still won't buy Nvidia.

This is really impressive, unlike Nvidia GPU price hikes those past years

How well dose Pascal /10 Series perform now?

I am content with my 7900 XTX for now. Granted I’m still not thrilled about the cost of computer stuff in general since the crypto rush.

I have a feeling that being able to run desktop and games on top of open NVidia driver stack is just a side project: there was a problem in the AI space that you cannot use secure boot with NVidia drivers on Linux. I'd say that this is a blocker level issue for all AI server farms running on truck loads of heavy NVidia hardware on top of Linux requiring security hardening.

Do Intel's Arc GPU's come with open source drivers?

what is the chance that valve is waiting for nvk before releasing the general release of steam-os

How do you think the drivers will work with wayland though?

What I miss is AMD MGPU benchmarks. Multiple AMD GPU are possible, there is a web page on AMD site about it, and nobody writes or talk about it. I do not care if they do not scale well, I just want to know how much they do not scale well, or if they scale well which motherboards support it bettter.

Cool when they get the clock speed modifiavle I think we finally have an viable FOSS Nvidia Driver for linux

THE YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP frfr

I am an nvidia user, i do have problems in wayland on my RTX 2060, so still using X11, but what i am really am looking for, is an API of translation of OpenCL to Vulkan, or CUDA to Vulkan, so my multimedia Graphics softwares, 3d packages, or any graphics card oriented software uses to render their stuff, to work. i'm looking forward for the dispute of AMD AMF, NVENC and QSV to explode.

I have been using Linux for a while but just started trying gaming too. 1060 3GB GPU with i5 2500k CPU. Installed pirated Death Stranding and its playable. I'm happy.

I'm interested to see NVK vs pro in Starfield. The proprietary driver has had a bug in it for months that makes Starfield _basically_ unplayable on anything under a 3070, and not particularly enjoyable until you get to 4090. Nvidia has allegedly fixed it internally, but are of course refusing to release that to the public so they didn't even include it in the 545 driver.

i always assumed it was pronounced "new view"

now somehow make it work with cuda and nvenc and NVIDIA gpus are actually worth buying

Me on maxwell: soon(tm) i too shall fly

I'm still on a 1050, and have no idea if Linux (Arch with KDE) and programs like Kdenlive, handbreak, FreeCAD, and other graphics centric programs are using the CUDA cores, but one: Mandelbulber 2 which doesn't due to it needing dual precision math processing rather than single precision math. Everything works, but I wonder if I'm getting as good performance as I could with a proper driver that can address all GPU features. I also don't game, so FPS isn't much of an issue, but rendering may be.

(cries with old 1050 I still have in my windows machine) I was going to swap this to a linux machine at some point since I have it on hand anyways.

Rocking a 1070 ti since 2018, would be nice to have it for more years since it's just as powerful for most things I do.

TBH 60FPS shouldn't be the standard at which you consider something good. It's playable, but it's a stuttery, laggy mess if you've ever used a high refresh rate monitor. We should honestly move away from the 60hz standard as well since a lot of devices are shipping with 120hz+ displays now. But especially for gaming, most people are running a 120hz display minimum already and resolution increases above 1440p are marginal at best on non-gigantic monitors it just makes sense. Besides, graphics in games aren't improving nearly as fast anymore either, yet the cost in terms of hardware requirements is increasing, so why not slow down on that end and ensure something decent looking is unbelivably fluid? On another note, I'm surprised 120FPS video hasn't become a thing on VOD services. It's so much smoother for those who have the hardware to run it and shouldn't take much more bandwidth/storage space if you limit the resolution for that framerate.

Better Wayland support? No longer using DKMS? Nothing to sign for secure boot? Able to be debugged and modified by Linux devs? I see a lot of wins and nothing bad so far.

So where's the 10 series sitting?

I don't mean to be a negative nancy but that is something I still can't really agree with from my personal experiences. On a GTX 1070 I am still entirely unable to even boot into something like ParrotOS or certain Fedora systems because they insist on shipping with the Nouveau drivers. Uninstalling them properly and switching to the proprietary drivers was virtually impossible when I tried this now even a month ago. We are still ways off, but it's still great to see these people put time and effort into the project.

I'm planning to buy Tuxedo full AMD laptop, because current Linux laptops with Nvidia still face various issues, especially with Wayland. Old Nvidia GPUs are working fine in that regard, but I don't want to wait years, I want it to work well now. Hence, I stand by my decision. In a few years, hopefully, the situation may change.

The proprietary Nvidia drivers work perfectly, even with my own custom kernels.

I had some very bad time trying to fix random full system freezes on my old Nvidia card on both types of drivers. I really don't think that the community has enough expertise and manpower to make and test driver variants for every possible GPU model. So I will be staying on AMD with zero issues for quite some time in the future with the prices of current GPU's.

I actually want my next laptop (this one is just 1 year old and had Nvidia) to carry an Intel GPU. If their frame generation will have feature & performance parity it will be even better. Nothing good comes from insiating on those old 2 companies.

Super interesting!

A few months late here, but this is exciting news for Nvidia GPU owners. When I started using Linux earlier in 2024 one of my worries was gaming even on an AMD gpu. I was surprised that the games I play, basically work out of the box at most changing the proton settings. Anything to make the experience better, AMN, Intel, or Nvidia is great news.

If that laptop wasn't failing I'd try it. That laptop was a beast once the proprietary driver got good. Never thought to try noveau itself again bc common theory has always been noveau is good enough to get things running, then proprietary for everything else. I'm on full amd right now for both desktop and laptop and doubt I'll be going back before its as good as it will be soon enough... 😅

Crazy how times have changed. In the early 2000's Intel graphics were the only stable thing, then everyone recommended nVidia for the longest time until AMD took over ATi and rewrote their graphics drivers for Linux, now nVidia FINALLY reenters the game. To me as a consumer I have no alliance with either party but at the same time, I am very happy that the issues of Linux gaming get lowered more and more. Good quality FOSS nVidia drivers might push VALVE to release SteamOS 3 for desktop too, so I am more than excited for it albeit I will still stay with my RX5700 for quite a while.

great video very very interesting.

where market prices are these days for GPUs, it's unlikely that I'll ever be able to get a new one. I have a GTX 1060 in my desktop, and that has been more than good enough for me anyways. I don't think there's really anything that it ever struggled with. Right now, I don't know that there is a good enough reason for me to upgrade, even if I could. This is promising progress though.

I rather stay with AMD or Intel since both compnaies are fully devoted to support the their open source drivers and if it comes to Intel, Battlemage is looking promising if Intel can keeps their goals, nvdidia will get the max pass unless they put in some own proper work on the open source side, either way still good news for the nvidia folks who love Linux and will have a better painfree experince in the comming years.

My 980ti can do Vulkan 1.3.260. Seems a shame to not support a few more generations older. heh. I had always planned on going to AMD for my next gpu anyway. But if this thing takes off maybe Nvidia won't be so bad.

I'm currently thinking of replacing my 2070 Super (well, soon at least). Currently on Windows 11, but I have the plann to switch to Linux. Maybe it won't be an AMD chip afterall....

The fact that we're now entering a future, where I may eventually replace ACER Nitro 2019 laptop PC with an Nvidia GTX 1650 GPU with Windows 10 to Linux (via Nouveau/NVK), might become a reality.

It would be really funny if Nvidia just decides to randomly drop open source drivers now.

As of kernel 6.7 I can play 2d games on my 4090 using the nouveau drivers.

Really happy to see this. I use the proprietary drivers, but I'll go wherever the best experience is and if that's open source then all the better.

I really need cuda support and that is likely going to be a while

This is great news for me. I have an AMD desktop with an Asus 2080Ti Strix that is getting Linux'd quite soon as I will never, ever run Win11 or up. This machine was a pandemic build for gaming. I hadn't run Windows since 1998 and now I can eject this OS entirely. I was going to replace the card with an AMD but maybe I won't. Maybe just use the prop. drivers for a bit and then switch when the FOSS drivers are baked enough to do what I need. Hot damn, this is good news.

How important was Nvidia opening up their kernel module?

With the recent price gouging and "We would like to focus on miners and vapor A.I" attitude on the side of NV in mind i don't think you'd see me fawning over their slabs anytime soon. The fact that they have the same attitude toward oss driver as Linus Torvalds has towards NV is just another nail in the coffin. Alongside dubious engineering and production (melting connectors, boards bending and breaking under their own weight, etc) Almost 20 years ago, i bought a g Force 200 MX (afair) and it was the last bit of NV i ever touched, because for a long time they where far from being a competition to ATI and later, when they found their footing again, they developed an attitude that was far from resonating with me.

Just when I upgraded my GPU to AMD lol.

Does this mean I get to use Wayland soon? 😗

Well, I already bought a AMD only rig..