Open-Supply Nouveau+NVK vs. NVIDIA 580 Linux Gaming/Graphics & Compute Driver Performance

This Black Friday is an in-depth take a look at the present efficiency of the open-source NVIDIA Linux driver stack with the Nouveau kernel driver (the Nova driver not but being prepared for end-users) paired with the newest Mesa NVK driver for open-source Vulkan API help. With that NVK Vulkan driver can also be trying on the OpenGL efficiency utilizing the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver used now for OpenGL on fashionable NVIDIA GPUs fairly than sustaining the Nouveau Gallium3D driver. Plus the Rusticl driver for OpenCL compute atop the NVK driver. This absolutely open-source and newest NVIDIA Linux driver help was in comparison with NVIDIA’s official 580 collection Linux driver. Both RTX 40 Ada and RTX 50 Blackwell graphics playing cards had been examined for this thorough GPU driver comparability.

The final time trying on the NVK vs. NVIDIA Linux GPU driver efficiency was again in July and since then the open-source driver stack has continued maturing quite a bit. Back in July there have been bugs stopping the RTX 50 Blackwell graphics playing cards from being examined, which fortunately have since been resolved in newer variations of the Linux kernel. The NVK Mesa driver has added help for extra Vulkan API extensions plus quite a lot of efficiency optimizations. Rusticl and Zink have additionally continued advancing as nicely.

For this Black Friday benchmarking the next driver/software program configurations had been examined:

NVK: The out-of-the-box Nouveau with NVK driver expertise discovered on Ubuntu 25.10. This is with the Linux 6.17 kernel and Mesa 25.2 software program.

NVK Git: Upgrading the identical system to utilizing the Linux 6.18 Git kernel in addition to Mesa 26.0-devel as of 24 November utilizing the Mesa ACO PPA on Ubuntu 25.10 for simple reproducibility.

NVIDIA 580: Atop the Ubuntu 25.10 + Linux 6.17 setup, deploying the NVIDIA 580.95.05 official Linux graphics driver.

These three NVIDIA Linux graphics driver configurations had been examined with the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER, RTX 4080 SUPER, and RTX 5080 graphics playing cards. All of those examined graphics playing cards had been working positive on Nouveau/NVK with the configurations examined.

From there with these three driver configurations and three NVIDIA GeForce RTX Ada and Blackwell graphics playing cards it was on to benchmarking numerous OpenGL and Vulkan workloads together with OpenCL.