A few months ago, users could run The Talos Principle at 5 FPS at 1024 x 576 with NVK. Well, the open-source driver is quickly making more progress. The framerate for the same game has now more than doubled at 13 FPS. I don’t think I could adapt to that framerate; I would probably get a headache. But hey, that framerate is pretty close to the 20 FPS that Zelda: Ocarina of Time ran back in the N64 days.

Dave Airlie, developer at Red Hat, showed off the progress. In their Tweet they mention that the game is being played on a laptop and “running the NVIDIA GPU in offload mode, so 4K image is being copied to the internal Intel GPU for display.” Apparently this driver is also making use of NVIDIA’s GPU System Processor (GSP), which – according to Phoronix – is “needed for being able to deliver better open-source driver support and performance.”

I’m going to bet by the summer, this same game will be running at least 30 FPS. Great progress so far! See the post from Phoronix for more of the technical details.

Cover image credit: Dave Airlie