Open-Source Nouveau Performance With Linux 7.0 + NVK Mesa 26.1-dev vs. NVIDIA Linux Driver
ViennaCL was another OpenCL workload showing that Nouveau with NVK/Rusticl still isn't remotely competitive to the official NVIDIA driver for GPU compute.
Ditto for the Darktable RAW photography software with its OpenCL backend.
The ProjectPhysX OpenCL benchmarks show some very nice gains made by the Mesa driver stack in recent months for these micro-benchmarks.
Long story short from this mix of gaming and graphics to OpenCL compute workloads, Linux 7.0 and Mesa 26.1-devel is much better off than where Nouveau/NVK was just six months ago for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 Blackwell performance. On a geo mean basis the performance tripled. But still for most workloads tested, the latest open-source Nouveau/NVK driver stack was delivering less than half the performance of the official NVIDIA Linux driver with this GeForce RTX 5080 graphics card running in the System76 Thelio Mira desktop.
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