Nouveau

Nouveau is a free/libre driver project for NVIDIA GPUs, addressing the need for open drivers that provide graphics acceleration on Linux. It combines a Linux kernel driver named nouveau with OpenGL and Vulkan drivers delivered through Mesa, covering rendering, display, and video decoding on supported hardware.

OpenGL is supported across all GPUs, while Vulkan covers Kepler and later. The NVK Vulkan driver is enabled by default in Mesa and is a conformant Vulkan 1.4 implementation, with Zink enabled by default as the preferred OpenGL driver for Turing and newer GPUs. Video decoding acceleration is supported on most pre-Maxwell cards. Automatic reclocking is available for Turing and newer GPUs through GSP firmware, and manual performance level selection is available on GM10x Maxwell, Kepler, and Tesla G94-GT218 GPUs via /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/pstate. Related components include libdrm, Mesa, and xf86-video-nouveau.

The project is aimed at Linux users and developers working with NVIDIA hardware. It is distributed as free software with source repositories for the kernel driver, Mesa, and the Xorg video driver; no paid editions, trials, or seat-based plans are described.