Phoronix has conducted a detailed comparison of the open-source NVIDIA Linux driver stack, featuring the Nouveau kernel driver and Mesa NVK for Vulkan support, against NVIDIA's official 580 series driver. The evaluation includes gaming, graphics, and compute performance on recent RTX GPUs. This update follows significant improvements since a July assessment.
The review examines the performance of the open-source NVIDIA Linux drivers, using the Nouveau kernel driver alongside the latest Mesa NVK for Vulkan API support. For OpenGL, it employs the Zink driver on top of Vulkan, replacing the older Nouveau Gallium3D approach for modern NVIDIA GPUs. Additionally, the Rusticl driver handles OpenCL compute tasks via NVK.
Tested configurations include the standard NVK setup on Ubuntu 25.10 with Linux 6.17 kernel and Mesa 25.2. An advanced version uses Linux 6.18 Git kernel and Mesa 26.0-devel from November 24, accessible via the Mesa ACO PPA on the same Ubuntu base. The proprietary option deploys NVIDIA's 580.95.05 driver on Ubuntu 25.10 with Linux 6.17.
Benchmarks cover GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER, RTX 4080 SUPER from the Ada series, and RTX 5080 from Blackwell. All GPUs functioned properly with Nouveau and NVK in these setups. The tests evaluate OpenGL and Vulkan workloads for gaming and graphics, plus OpenCL for compute.
Since the prior July comparison, NVK has gained more Vulkan extensions and optimizations. Rusticl and Zink have advanced too. Earlier issues blocking RTX 50 Blackwell testing on Linux kernels have been fixed, enabling this comprehensive evaluation across driver stacks and hardware.