Of all the things I've done in my career, this is probably the one I'm the most proud of.

When me and two others at Intel started working on the Vulkan driver, Mesa had a reputation for being behind on everything. The Intel drivers were still on OpenGL 3.3 (fp64 was a pain), OpenGL ES 3.1 or maybe even 3.0, and perf okay but kinda meh. I think there might have been a driver or two in Mesa exposing GL 4.x at that point but, as a project, we were still a ways from full OpenGL 4.5.

With Vulkan, we jumped the line and had Vulkan 1.0 conformance on Intel on launch day. It was a hell of a lot of work (I worked 80+ hours/week that last month or two) but we got there. The driver branch we dropped that day was pretty shaky and it was missing a lot of features but we were there. It took a year or two to get to where we had decent perf, working games, and feature parity with the hardware. But that was okay because there were only two titles that came out that first year and getting them working was the important bit.

Then Vulkan 1.1 came out and we were there with a day-0 driver again. This time, without missing any interesting features. Then 1.2 and 1.3 and now 1.4. With every new version, more drivers joined the train. When Vulkan 1.4 launched, there were 5 different Mesa drivers that landed MRs to enable Vulkan 1.4 on launch day.

This has totally changed the conversation about open source graphics. When I started, everyone scoffed at Mesa. Today, the speed at which we're able to implement features and launch new API versions is the envy of the graphics industry. We're still not totally caught up everywhere—NVK and PanVK still need work and etnaviv Vulkan doesn't exist—but we're going toe to toe with the proprietary driver teams across most of the industry. Also, the fact that Linux Vulkan drivers are being hammered by most of Valve's library via DXVK and VKD3D often means the Mesa drivers are often more stable and robust than their closed source or Windows counterparts.

It's a totally different world for 3D graphics now than it was a decade ago.

It also turns out that VKD3D-Proton isn't actually getting the VK_EXT_descriptor_buffer path on NVK. This is due to a combination of two things:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/33589

and

https://github.com/HansKristian-Work/vkd3d-proton/pull/2346

Once those two land, we should be getting the same descriptor path as the NVIDIA proprietary driver. There's still some work to do to figure out the remaining slowness but at least we're now hitting the right paths inside VKD3D.

Also, a huge thank you to everyone who's been trying out games and posting screenshots of them working.

I've been head-down for a year and a half now to get us to this point. For most of that time, I rarely saw a single rendered pixel. It's incredibly satisfying to see it all come together. Screenshots of all sorts of different games working is really encouraging.

So, please, if you try out your favorite game on NVK, post a screenshot and tag me in it. I'd love to see what y'all are playing.💜