Over the past week I have published a number of GeForce RTX 5090 Linux compute benchmarks as well as the GeForce RTX 5080 on Linux. With that early NVIDIA R570 Linux driver build as part of the CUDA 12.8 package I was asked to wait on Linux gaming benchmarks until the proper RTX 50 Linux driver is released. Well, it was released this morning with the NVIDIA 570.86.16 Linux beta availability and have in turn been pushing the GeForce RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 through a number of Linux gaming/graphics benchmarks.
In this article is an initial look at the GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition and GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition graphics cards under various Linux gaming/graphics benchmarks for what I’ve been able to wrap up so far today compared to recently re-tested prior generation NVIDIA GeForce RTX and AMD Radeon RX graphics cards.
This initial benchmarking bout for NVIDIA Blackwell Linux gaming included:
– RTX 2070
– RTX 2070 SUPER
– RTX 2080
– RTX 2080 SUPER
– RTX 2080 Ti
– TITAN RTX
– RTX 3070
– RTX 3070 Ti
– RTX 3080
– RTX 3090
– RTX 4070
– RTX 4070 SUPER
– RTX 4070 Ti SUPER
– RTX 4080
– RTX 4080 SUPER
– RTX 4090
– RTX 5080
– RTX 5090
– RX 7800 XT
– RX 7900 GRE
– RX 7900 XT
– RX 7900 XTX
The GeForce RTX 5080/5090 were running with today’s NVIDIA 570.86.16 beta driver while the prior NVIDIA cards were on the NVIDIA R565 stable driver with being re-tested over the course of January. The AMD Radeon graphics cards were using their upstream state with the Linux 6.13 kernel and Mesa 25.0-devel from the Oibaf PPA.
The NVIDIA R570 packaged Linux driver is the only means of RTX 50 series support on Linux right now. There isn’t yet any Nouveau or experimental NOVA kernel driver support yet for these new Blackwell graphics cards even with leveraging the NVIDIA GSP firmware. Plus the promising Rust-based NOVA driver hasn’t even been upstreamed into the Linux kernel yet and will still likely be sometime before that is really primed for the mainline kernel. The NVK Vulkan driver does continue mature within Mesa. But for now those purchasing the $999 or $1999 USD graphics cards will really be wanting to use the NVIDIA packaged driver stack for Linux.
The NVIDIA 570.86.16 beta driver and the earlier 560.86.10 beta build wuithin the CUDA 12.8 driver package has been working out well for the GeForce RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 atop Ubuntu Linux. I haven’t encountered any stability issues, feature limitations, or other issues compared to prior generation NVIDIA GeForce RTX graphics cards on Linux. It’s been a great experience with my testing thus far.
So let’s continue on with an initial look at the GeForce RTX 5080/5090 Linux gaming/graphics performance in several titles that are benchmark-friendly and meet my requirements around reproducibility and automation. Thanks to NVIDIA for supplying these graphics cards for launch-day Linux testing.
