With GNOME 50 that is being used by default with the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release, you may be curious about the out-of-the-box performance especially compared to prior Ubuntu Linux releases — especially with Mutter 50 having some NVIDIA optimizations. In today’s article is a first look at how the NVIDIA Linux gaming performance on Ubuntu 26.04 is looking compared to the current Ubuntu 25.10 release.
Using the same system (an AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D desktop) and testing on both the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 graphics cards, I ran some comparison benchmarks of a clean install of Ubuntu 25.10 compared to the current daily Ubuntu 26.04 snapshot.
Both the Ubuntu 25.10 and Ubuntu 26.10 repositories at this time had the same NVIDIA 590.48.01 stable driver available that was tested on both Ubuntu Linux releases. Thus primarily a look at the newer Linux kernel and updated GNOME 50 desktop stack, among other package updates, with Ubuntu 26.04.
A variety of Linux games/graphics benchmarks both native and running via Steam Play (Proton) were tested in seeing any performance differences between Ubuntu 25.10 and Ubuntu 26.04 while using the same NVIDIA R590 Linux driver on these two GeForce RTX 50 Blackwell graphics cards.
