Open-Source Nouveau Performance With Linux 7.0 + NVK Mesa 26.1-dev vs. NVIDIA Linux Driver
The demanding GravityMark benchmark showed some very nice gains in recent months for Nouveau/NVK compared to where the performance was on Ubuntu 25.10. But even with the latest gains the performance is around half that of the NVIDIA R590 Linux driver for this Blackwell desktop graphics card. The GravityMark Vulkan ray-tracing benchmark also couldn't be run since NVK doesn't yet support Vulkan ray-tracing.
With 3DMark Wild Life Extreme on Linux, the latest NVK/Nouveau stack is up to 72% the speed of the NVIDIA R590 Linux driver, thanks to nice performance improvements made in recent months.
With Batman: Arkham Knight on Linux via Steam Play, the Nouveau/NVK stack is up to around half the performance of the NVIDIA R590 driver with this GeForce RTX 5080 graphics card running in the System76 Thelio Mira.
Sadly, with Counter-Strike 2 the NVK/Nouveau performance on this RTX 5080 gaming desktop the performance was around 40% the speed of the official NVIDIA Linux graphics driver stack. At least though the performance continues improving in recent months to make Linux gaming more viable on NVK/Nouveau.