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 5 of 7. 37 Comments.

👁 Llama.cpp benchmark with settings of Backend: Vulkan, Model: Qwen3-8B-Q8_0, Test: Text Generation 128. NVIDIA 590.48.01 was the fastest.

👁 Llama.cpp benchmark with settings of Backend: Vulkan, Model: Qwen3-8B-Q8_0, Test: Prompt Processing 512. NVIDIA 590.48.01 was the fastest.

👁 Llama.cpp benchmark with settings of Backend: Vulkan, Model: Qwen3-8B-Q8_0, Test: Prompt Processing 2048. NVIDIA 590.48.01 was the fastest.

👁 Llama.cpp benchmark with settings of Backend: Vulkan, Model: gpt-oss-20b-Q8_0, Test: Text Generation 128. NVIDIA 590.48.01 was the fastest.

👁 Llama.cpp benchmark with settings of Backend: Vulkan, Model: gpt-oss-20b-Q8_0, Test: Prompt Processing 512. NVIDIA 590.48.01 was the fastest.

👁 Llama.cpp benchmark with settings of Backend: Vulkan, Model: gpt-oss-20b-Q8_0, Test: Prompt Processing 2048. NVIDIA 590.48.01 was the fastest.

👁 Llama.cpp benchmark with settings of Backend: Vulkan, Model: Llama-3.1-Tulu-3-8B-Q8_0, Test: Text Generation 128. NVIDIA 590.48.01 was the fastest.

👁 Llama.cpp benchmark with settings of Backend: Vulkan, Model: Llama-3.1-Tulu-3-8B-Q8_0, Test: Prompt Processing 512. NVIDIA 590.48.01 was the fastest.

👁 Llama.cpp benchmark with settings of Backend: Vulkan, Model: Llama-3.1-Tulu-3-8B-Q8_0, Test: Prompt Processing 2048. NVIDIA 590.48.01 was the fastest.

👁 Llama.cpp benchmark with settings of Backend: Vulkan, Model: Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3-Q8_0, Test: Text Generation 128. NVIDIA 590.48.01 was the fastest.

👁 Llama.cpp benchmark with settings of Backend: Vulkan, Model: Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3-Q8_0, Test: Prompt Processing 512. NVIDIA 590.48.01 was the fastest.

For Vulkan AI inferencing performance with Llama.cpp, there has been much progress in recent months on better NVIDIA Blackwell performance atop Nouveau/NVK. For text generation this fully open-source driver stack was more than half the performance of the NVIDIA R590 driver, but fell sharply behind in prompt processing performance.

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URL: https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-70-nouveau/5

⇱ 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