In the past few weeks on Phoronix we have explored a fresh look at the open-source Nouveau/NVK performance compared to the NVIDIA 580 packaged Linux driver as well as a multi-generation Nouveau vs. NVIDIA comparison from the GeForce GTX 980 to RTX 5080 since the forthcoming NVIDIA R590 driver series is ending the GTX 900/1000 series support. Today’s article provides another round of fresh open-source NVIDIA Linuc graphics performance data using the upstream open-source Nouveau and Mesa NVK/Zink drivers compared not only to the current NVIDIA packaged driver but also competitively for how the GeForce RTX 50 line-up compares to the current AMD Radeon RX 9000 series graphics cards.
In approaching the end of 2025, today’s article provides fresh graphics/gaming benchmarks looking at the current-gen NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 “Blackwell” graphics cards up against the current AMD Radeon RX 9000 series graphics cards.
In the case of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 graphics they were tested on the fully open-source and upstream driver support using the Linux 6.19 kernel paired with the Mesa 26.0-devel NVK (and Zink for OpenGL) graphics driver support. Plus each RTX 50 graphics card was re-tested using the current NVIDIA 580.95.05 packaged Linux graphics driver, which includes NVIDIA’s out-of-tree open-source kernel graphics driver code paired with the proprietary user-space components. I tested the NVIDIA Blackwell graphics cards I have which include the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti, RTX 5070, RTX 5080, and RTX 5090.
On the AMD Radeon side was their upstream and open-source driver support, using the same Linux 6.18 + Mesa 26.0-devel combination used for the Nouveau testing. The Radeon RX 9060 XT, RX 9070, and RX 9070 XT graphics cards were tested.
From there it was off to the Linux benchmark races for seeing how the Radeon RX 9000 (RDNA4) graphics cards on their latest open-source driver stack are competing against both of the current NVIDIA Linux driver options. Moving into the future will also be the Nova kernel driver option too, but for now that isn’t yet ready for end-users and thus Nouveau is the only viable upstream kernel driver option for the near future.
