Fuck yes
When I pulled the trigger on moving my old gaming laptop to Nobara Linux I was able to get ME1/2LE running at 60 FPS stable with an i7-7000 series and a 1050 GPU (1920x1080.)
That machine never got me stable performance running windows, ever. Even when those specs were reasonable 8 years ago.
This is promising. What is the state of this driver in 2023? Whats still missing?
It only exposes Vulkan 1.0 which means only DXVK works and up to version 1.5.1, not later. Also, Rise of the Tomb Raider was extremely slow when I tried it so some major optimizations have to be done as well I think. Beyond that it’s perfectly usable.
Thats way better than I expected, way sooner!
Will I have a bad time if I try switching my Ubuntu machine to it, is desktop use generally stable/usable/testable right now?
The only way to properly use NVK now is Arch Linux or something based on it. Ubuntu doesn’t even remotely have the necessary packages yet. On Optimus (running with both GPUs -AMD and Nvidia - on) everything works splendidly desktop-wise yeah. On MUX (meaning running only on the Nvidia GPU on the laptop) nothing works properly, so be warned.
is there context as to why people are excited that a top-end gaming laptop capable of 4K gaming is playing a game from 16 years ago? …at 60fps?
Yes, the driver is 6 months old. It can also run Overwatch 2 at 100+ FPS in some areas. For 6 months, that’s staggering performance.
ohhhh NVK, didn’t spot that in the title!
