Initial DLSS Support Working on Open-Source Nvidia "NVK" Driver (bsky.app)

An independent developer got NVIDIA’s DLSS running on NVK—the open-source NVIDIA driver in Mesa—after roughly three days of work by implementing two vendor-specific Vulkan extensions (VK_NVX_binary_import and VK_NVX_image_view_handle). Because DLSS is delivered as launched CUDA kernels rather than ordinary Vulkan shaders, supporting those NVX extensions lets the open-source driver import and invoke the proprietary DLSS binaries; the proof-of-concept shows runtime upscale from 960×540 to 1920×1080 in Control. This is significant for the AI/ML and graphics communities because it demonstrates that vendor-provided, CUDA-based inferencing engines like DLSS can be executed from an open-source Vulkan driver through binary-import/interop hooks. Practically, that opens the door to running NVIDIA’s proprietary neural upscaling and potentially other CUDA-backed features on a free driver stack (benefiting Linux gamers, open-source graphics work, and research reproducibility). Caveats remain: this is an initial PoC, DLSS code itself remains proprietary and licensing/compatibility/performance edges still need ironing, and broader robustness, security review, and upstream integration into Mesa are future steps.