NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 GPUs Receive Initial Open-Source Support In Mesa

Mesa has apparently facilitated initial open-source support for OpenGL for NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 40 GPUs, as reported by Phoronix.

The support was made available by Karol Herbst, from the software company Red Hat. They merged NVIDIA's support for the Nouveau Gallium3D driver to allow OpenCL to function. Karol also disclosed his remarks on the merger, revealing the initial support:

Seems to just work. The 3D subchannel appears to be identical to Ampere. Nvidia didn't publish the compute class headers yet, so maybe something is up there.

CTS run looks good enough

Note: this contains a Cc stable tag, so we get that enablement shipped to users a bit faster.

However, this merger won't be as effective since NVIDIA is yet to sort out GSP firmware support for the Nouveau DRM kernel driver. In open-source technologies, NVIDIA has been on the back foot since its competitors like AMD & Intel released graphics driver stacks for the open-source platform allowing much superior compatibility. NVIDIA has been trying to move towards more open-source standards recently due to growing support for them in the development community.

Ada Lovelace gained support for an open-source Mesa Vulkan Driver previously named NVK. The support was brought in by experts within Red Hat and had already passed 98% of the Vulkan CTS with a very basic feature set. The aim was to bring NVK to the level of AMD's RADV, which is already in a pretty good state.

Since NVIDIA lacked such open-source technologies, we believe the gap will be bridged soon. NVIDIA's RTX 40 series being a more recent launch will take some time to get supported properly but it is nice to see the work being done and implemented even if there's still a long road ahead. Expect more open-source support in the coming months.

News Source: Phoronix