The open source, community-driven NVIDIA Linux driver stack is continuing to catch up with proprietary closed-source drivers and is steadily advancing toward "full parity" in terms of functionality. The latest development comes from NVK in the Mesa driver stack - an open source NVK Vulkan driver that has recently merged support for the DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) feature on Nvidia GPUs.
Development branch 26.2-devel of the Mesa graphics stack incorporates an important change: the open source NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver now provides support for Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) for modern games in the Linux/Steam Play environment.
This capability stems from a patch submitted last year by Autumn Ashton requesting implementation of the VK_NVX_binary_import extension in Mesa, a critical Vulkan extension required to enable DLSS on NVIDIA GPUs. This extension allows applications to import NVIDIA's CuBIN binaries and execute on the GPU. These CuBIN ELF files are essentially CUDA binaries pre-compiled for NVIDIA GPUs. Through VK_NVX_binary_import, the NVK driver can load and run the corresponding binary of DLSS to enable DLSS on the NVK driver.
Due to Autumn Ashton's reduced activity in Mesa development in recent months, this patch experienced merge conflicts and other issues during the merge process. Two months ago, developer Thomas Andersen submitted a new merge request to fix conflicts and improve the original patch, and finally pushed it into the Mesa 26.2 branch. It is this new merge request that has been finalized today, allowing NVK to work properly in games with DLSS enabled.
Currently, this DLSS support is still marked as experimental and needs to be explicitly enabled via the environment variable NVK_EXPERIMENTAL=dlss. Since DLSS relies on CUDA binaries, the implementation on the NVK side also requires matching bytecode for the GPU used, otherwise the functionality will not function properly. In contrast, NVIDIA's proprietary Vulkan driver supports this type of functionality via the PTX to bytecode path, and the NVK does not currently have the ability to convert NVIDIA PTX to Mesa NIR representation, which is a limitation of the current implementation.
Despite the known flaws and the yet-to-be-opened PTX conversion link, this merger is still regarded as an important development for the NVK and Linux open source graphics ecosystem. According to the Mesa project's plan, these changes will appear in the stable version Mesa 26.2, which is expected to be released in August, bringing new possibilities for Linux players using NVK to experience DLSS on open source drivers.