NVK, the open-source Vulkan driver for Nvidia GPUs in Mesa, has gained experimental DLSS support with the code landing in Mesa 26.2-devel. The driver loads Nvidia's own pre-compiled CUDA binaries rather than reimplementing the upscaler, a workaround that keeps the feature behind an experimental flag and ties it to whether compatible bytecode exists for a given card. DLSS runs on NVK through VK_NVX_binary_import, a Vulkan extension that loads Nvidia CuBIN files. Autumn Ashton opened the original pull request for the extension last year, and Thomas Andersen revived it roughly two months ago, with the path sitting behind the NVK_EXPERIMENTAL=dlss environment variable because known bugs remain. The catch is the reliance on pre-compiled binaries; NVK can only run DLSS where compatible bytecode already exists for the GPU in use. NVK began in 2022 and supports Turing (RTX 20-series and GTX 16-series) and newer architectures. In late 2024, it became the first open-source Vulkan driver for Nvidia hardware to pass Khronos conformance. At the XDC2025 conference in November, Ekstrand said NVK runs at around 50% of the official Nvidia driver's speed in many titles.