This Black Friday is an in-depth look at the current performance of the open-source NVIDIA Linux driver stack with the Nouveau kernel driver (the Nova driver not yet being ready for end-users) paired with the latest Mesa NVK driver for open-source Vulkan API support. With that NVK Vulkan driver is also looking at the OpenGL performance using the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver used now for OpenGL on modern NVIDIA GPUs rather than maintaining the Nouveau Gallium3D driver. Plus the Rusticl driver for OpenCL compute atop the NVK driver. This fully open-source and latest NVIDIA Linux driver support was compared to NVIDIA’s official 580 series Linux driver. Both RTX 40 Ada and RTX 50 Blackwell graphics cards were tested for this thorough GPU driver comparison.
The last time looking at the NVK vs. NVIDIA Linux GPU driver performance was back in July and since then the open-source driver stack has continued maturing quite a lot. Back in July there were bugs preventing the RTX 50 Blackwell graphics cards from being tested, which thankfully have since been resolved in newer versions of the Linux kernel. The NVK Mesa driver has added support for more Vulkan API extensions plus a variety of performance optimizations. Rusticl and Zink have also continued advancing as well.
For this Black Friday benchmarking the following driver/software configurations were tested:
NVK: The out-of-the-box Nouveau with NVK driver experience found on Ubuntu 25.10. This is with the Linux 6.17 kernel and Mesa 25.2 software.
NVK Git: Upgrading the same system to using the Linux 6.18 Git kernel as well as Mesa 26.0-devel as of 24 November using the Mesa ACO PPA on Ubuntu 25.10 for easy reproducibility.
NVIDIA 580: Atop the Ubuntu 25.10 + Linux 6.17 setup, deploying the NVIDIA 580.95.05 official Linux graphics driver.
These three NVIDIA Linux graphics driver configurations were tested with the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER, RTX 4080 SUPER, and RTX 5080 graphics cards. All of these tested graphics cards were working fine on Nouveau/NVK with the configurations tested.
From there with these three driver configurations and three NVIDIA GeForce RTX Ada and Blackwell graphics cards it was on to benchmarking various OpenGL and Vulkan workloads along with OpenCL.
