Open-Source NVIDIA NVK Vulkan Driver Now Supports DLSS
A pull request opened last year by Autumn Ashton was for implementing VK_NVX_binary_import support as the Vulkan extension needed for NVIDIA DLSS support with NVIDIA GPUs. Thomas Andersen two months ago opened a new pull request to fix merge conflicts and other fixes to that earlier pull request with Autumn having not been as active in Mesa development in recent months.
VK_NVX_binary_import is the binary extension that applies applications to import NVIDIA CuBIN binaries and execute them. The CuBIN ELF files are pre-baked CUDA binaries for execution on the NVIDIA GPUs. With VK_NVX_binary_import then it's possible to load the DLSS binaries for use with the NVIDIA GPUs via the NVK driver.
That newer pull request is what crossed the finish line today in being in Mesa 26.2 for letting NVK work with DLSS-enabled games. Though as there are some known bugs, for now the support is hidden behind the NVK_EXPERIMENTAL=dlss environment variable.
With DLSS relying on CUDA binaries, the support in turn also depends upon having compatible bytecode available for the GPU in use by the NVK driver otherwise things won't work. The proprietary NVIDIA Vulkan driver supports a PTX to bytecode path but that isn't yet such a thing for the Mesa NVK driver without being able to translate NVIDIA PTX to Mesa's NIR representation.
Exciting to see this code merged for Mesa 26.2 that will be out as stable in August.
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