With the NVIDIA 590 Linux driver series removing GeForce 900 series “Maxwell” and GeForce 10 series “Pascal” as part of punting it off to the latest legacy driver branch, it’s time for a last look at how the mainline NVIDIA Linux driver is performing with these aging graphics cards relative to the current state of the upstream open-source NVIDIA Linux drivers. In this article is a look at how the open-source and upstream Nouveau kernel driver with Nouveau/NVK Mesa drivers are performing relative to the NVIDIA 580 series with its Maxwell and Pascal support. For further perspective is also tossing in newer graphics cards too for providing a end-of-year GeForce 980 / 1080 / 2080 / 3080 / 4080 / 5080 series comparison between these different Linux drivers.
For those still using Maxwell or Pascal graphics cards, you can continue using the NVIDIA 580 driver series but the NVIDIA 590 series and later remove support for these 9+ year old NVIDIA graphics cards. Or there is the upstream and open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) Linux drivers but for these generations they are in a tough spot open-source wise.
Only with the first-generation Maxwell (GTX 750 / GTX 945A series) is there any open-source driver support with re-clocking capabilities. It’s with the GM200 series (nearly all GTX 900 series products) where the signed firmware requirements were introduced by NVIDIA and thus obstruct the open-source Nouveau kernel driver from implementing proper power management needed for GPU re-clocking: allowing the GPU core and memory clocks to run at their rated speeds compared to their very slow boot clock frequencies. Due to the signed firmware requirements and no other workarounds since, the GeForce GTX 900 and GeForce GTX 1000 series remain in a tough spot for their open-source driver support… The GeForce GTX 700 cards are a much better option for having full open-source driver support without any signed firmware requirements and can be manually re-clocked to their rated frequencies.
It’s with the Turing graphics processors that succeeded Pascal where NVIDIA introduced the GPU System Processor (GSP) for offloading power management and related tasks to that micro-controller. Nouveau supports making use of the GSP along with the GSP firmware binaries released by NVIDIA. That is what allows the RTX 20 series and newer to enjoy better open-source Nouveau driver support thanks to the GSP route. The Rust-written modern Nova open-source kernel driver being developed with cooperation of NVIDIA also targets the GSP and thus is for Turing GPUs and newer.
This leaves the Maxwell2 and Pascal graphics cards in a tough position in not having re-clocking / power management support. The older GeForce GTX 700 series remain better supported or the Turing GPUs and newer thanks to the GSP. These benchmarks today help quantify that impact.
For this benchmarking I tested Maxwell and newer of the various x80 series graphics cards. Due to hardware availability and what graphics cards weren’t busy in other test systems meant a mix of SUPER and Ti variants in some cases but long story short it’s a Nouveau/Mesa vs. NVIDIA 580 comparison for the GeForce GTX 980 Ti, GTX 1080, RTX 2080 SUPER, RTX 3080 Ti, RTX 4080, and RTX 5080 graphics cards. All from the same AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D test system running Ubuntu 25.10.
On the NVIDIA 580 driver side was the 580.95.05 packaged driver readily available within the Ubuntu archive. For the latest open-source NVIDIA upstream experience was the Linux 6.18 kernel paired with Mesa 26.0-devel as of last week.
There were some caveats in the testing with the GTX 980 and GTX 1080 not reliably allowing the system to POST on this ASRock X870E Taichi motherboard. Most times these old graphics cards installed would result in the system failing to POST. I got lucky with the Nouveau runs after a few reboots but then when it came to running the NVIDIA 580 driver even after literally dozens of reboots, clearing the CMOS, adjusting BIOS/PCI tunables and the like. So that comparison aspect was thwarted and in part why the comparison was also expected to Turing and newer.
When it came to the Nouveau kernel driver usage, there was an exception when it came to the GeForce RTX 4080 Founder’s Edition graphics card. None of the DisplayPort outputs were working when using the Nouveau driver but worked fine on the NVIDIA 580 driver. As soon as the Nouveau DRM driver was loaded during boot the screen would stop and never restore signal. So there wasn’t any Nouveau data available for the RTX 4080 on the Linux 6.18 kernel.
Due to the constraints of Nouveau on Maxwell and Pascal, the workloads were limited primarily for games that would run well there on the handicapped, boot-speed-crippled graphics cards. In addition to OpenGL and Vulkan graphics benchmarks, Vulkan compute benchmarks were also run plus some OpenCL benchmarks too. With the open-source Nouveau driver the Rusticl Gallium3D implementation provides OpenCL 3.0 support.
