Open-Source Nouveau Performance With Linux 7.0 + NVK Mesa 26.1-dev vs. NVIDIA Linux Driver

Written by Michael Larabel in Display Drivers on 26 March 2026 at 12:00 PM EDT. Page 4 of 7. 37 Comments.

👁 Tesseract benchmark with settings of Resolution: 3840 x 2160. NVIDIA 590.48.01 was the fastest.

👁 Unigine Heaven benchmark with settings of Resolution: 3840 x 2160, Mode: Fullscreen, Renderer: OpenGL. NVIDIA 590.48.01 was the fastest.

👁 Unigine Superposition benchmark with settings of Resolution: 3840 x 2160, Mode: Fullscreen, Quality: Low, Renderer: OpenGL. NVIDIA 590.48.01 was the fastest.

👁 Unigine Superposition benchmark with settings of Resolution: 3840 x 2160, Mode: Fullscreen, Quality: High, Renderer: OpenGL. NVIDIA 590.48.01 was the fastest.

👁 Unigine Superposition benchmark with settings of Resolution: 3840 x 2160, Mode: Fullscreen, Quality: Medium, Renderer: OpenGL. NVIDIA 590.48.01 was the fastest.

The OpenGL performance with Zink atop the NVK driver was quite good various legacy games/benchmarks tested. With the demanding Unigine Superposition test though it was still around half the performance of the NVIDIA R590 driver.

👁 yquake2 benchmark with settings of Renderer: Vulkan, AF: On, MSAA: On, Resolution: 5120 x 2880. NVIDIA 590.48.01 was the fastest.

👁 yquake2 benchmark with settings of Renderer: Vulkan, AF: Off, MSAA: On, Resolution: 5120 x 2880. NVIDIA 590.48.01 was the fastest.

👁 yquake2 benchmark with settings of Renderer: Vulkan, AF: On, MSAA: Off, Resolution: 5120 x 2880. NVIDIA 590.48.01 was the fastest.

👁 yquake2 benchmark with settings of Renderer: Vulkan, AF: Off, MSAA: Off, Resolution: 5120 x 2880. NVIDIA 590.48.01 was the fastest.

👁 yquake2 benchmark with settings of Renderer: OpenGL 3.x, AF: On, MSAA: On, Resolution: 5120 x 2880. NVIDIA 590.48.01 was the fastest.

👁 yquake2 benchmark with settings of Renderer: OpenGL 3.x, AF: Off, MSAA: On, Resolution: 5120 x 2880. NVIDIA 590.48.01 was the fastest.

👁 yquake2 benchmark with settings of Renderer: OpenGL 3.x, AF: On, MSAA: Off, Resolution: 5120 x 2880. NVIDIA 590.48.01 was the fastest.

👁 yquake2 benchmark with settings of Renderer: OpenGL 3.x, AF: Off, MSAA: Off, Resolution: 5120 x 2880. NVIDIA 590.48.01 was the fastest.

With YQuake2 the NVK/Nouveau driver performance improved in recent months but was only running at around a quarter the performance of the official NVIDIA Linux driver.

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URL: https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-70-nouveau/4

⇱ Open-Source Nouveau Performance With Linux 7.0 + NVK Mesa 26.1-dev vs. NVIDIA Linux Driver - Phoronix

Open-Source Nouveau Performance With Linux 7.0 + NVK Mesa 26.1-dev vs. NVIDIA Linux Driver