A number of Phoronix readers have been interested in seeing some fresh benchmarks of Mesa’s NVK Vulkan driver in providing open-source Vulkan API support on NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards as well as the modern OpenGL approach of using Zink for layering OpenGL atop Vulkan. Here are some fresh benchmarks using the very latest Mesa 25.2 code for NVK on the latest upstream stable Linux kernel compared to the NVIDIA R575 official Linux graphics driver stack.
This round of testing is providing a fresh look at the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 series performance between the Mesa NVK driver with Nouveau kernel driver stack compared to NVIDIA’s official latest packaged driver stack with its out-of-tree open-source MIT/GPL kernel driver. Linux 6.15 stable was in use for all testing as well as the Mesa 25.2-devel code via the Mesa ACO PPA on Ubuntu Linux for easy reproducibility.
For this testing the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER and RTX 4080 SUPER graphics cards were tested on both of these NVIDIA Linux driver options. With the in-development Linux 6.16 kernel there is preliminary Nouveau driver support for NVIDIA RTX 50 / Blackwell GPUs but when trying Linux 6.16 Git and the very latest firmware found in linux-firmware.git, I wasn’t able to get any of my Blackwell graphics cards working on Nouveau. Even with Linux 6.16 Git as of a few days ago and the latest public firmware in the initramfs, each time trying RTX 50 graphics cards was just yielding Nouveau errors around the probe failing with error -2. Thus the newest RTX 50 graphics cards couldn’t be tested today on Nouveau and so I resorted to the RTX 40 series that was playing nicer with Nouveau.
Using Linux 6.15 stable with the latest linux-firmware and Mesa 25.2 was working out well out-of-the-box on the GeForce RTX 40 graphics cards attempted. I also then tried testing RTX 30 too after that but there I was running into mode-setting issues after Plymouth where as the RTX 40 cards worked fine on the same 4K display and same other software/hardware.
So where we are at for today’s testing is looking at the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER and RTX 4080 SUPER on Linux 6.15 + Mesa 25.2-devel using NVK Vulkan and Zink for OpenGL atop NVK compared to the NVIDIA 575.57.08 official Linux driver release.
For the most part the RTX 40 and Nouveau/NVK experience was trouble-free and working well with various OpenGL and Vulkan games but like in DiRT Rally 2.0 were occasional texture issues around the tires, for example. But in not testing NVK in some months it overall was a much better experience than from the early days and continues improving.
Outside of gaming, Zink+NVK for the overall GNOME Wayland desktop experience was nice except for occasional window rendering issues such as sometimes when resizing the GNOME Terminal.
Let’s see though how the performance is looking relative to the NVIDIA official Linux driver.
