The open-source, community-driven NVIDIA Linux driver stack has been on a constant march towards feature-parity with the proprietary NVIDIA driver. The latest news in Mesa driver stack comes by way of NVK, the open-source NVK Vulkan driver, which recently merged support for DLSS support on NVIDIA GPUs. As reported by Phoronix, the pull request will see DLSS support merge into Mesa 26.2 via the VK_NVX_binary_import binary extension, which is slated to launch in the stable update in August 2026, and the feature is currently set to experimental by default. In order to enable DLSS support, players will need to add NVK_EXPERIMENTAL=dlss environmental variable.

Recent performance comparisons still show significant performance differences between the open-source driver and NVIDIA's proprietary driver, however, it seems as though continued community contributions have started to close those gaps. Support for DLSS on the open-source driver should also help mitigate some of the performance regressions present in current NVK driver versions.