Valve Developer Gets Initial DLSS Support Working on FOSS Nvidia "NVK" Driver (www.phoronix.com)

Valve developer Ashton announced that after a few days of hacking DLSS (NVIDIA’s neural-network-powered upscaling) is running on NVK, the open-source NVIDIA Vulkan driver in Mesa. Ashton wired up the VK_NVX_binary_import and VK_NVX_image_view_handle NVIDIA Vulkan extensions — the hooks DXVK and VKD3D‑Proton (via the DXVK‑NVAPI project) use to invoke NVIDIA’s DLSS implementation — and shared an image of the game Control being upscaled. The work is still experimental and the patches aren’t merged yet, but an initial Mesa branch (VK_NVX_binary_import) and early code are available for inspection. This matters because DLSS is a widely used AI/ML inference pipeline (precompiled CUDA kernels and model code) and getting it to run on a FOSS driver lowers the barrier to using NVIDIA’s real-time upscaling outside the proprietary driver stack. Technically, the effort focuses on exposing NVX binary import/image-view handle semantics so NVK can call vendor-provided binaries; it doesn’t reimplement DLSS models themselves. If upstreamed, this could improve Linux gaming and Proton compatibility and enable easier experimentation with real-time upscaling on open drivers — while still depending on NVIDIA’s binary blobs for the actual CUDA kernels and model execution.