Mesa 25.2 NVK vs. NVIDIA R575 Linux Graphics Performance For GeForce RTX 40 Series
Written by Michael Larabel in Display Drivers on 14 July 2025 at 11:38 AM EDT. Page 2 of 7. 40 Comments.
When kicking off this Nouveau/NVK testing with Counter-Strike 2, the RTX 40 series performance on this fully open-source driver stack was at less than half the performance of the official NVIDIA Linux driver. The frame-rates were at least playable at 1080p for CS2 on this fully open-source driver for the RTX 4070 SUPER and RTX 4080 SUPER, but a lot of performance lost compared to the NVIDIA R575 Linux driver.
At 4K, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER on Linux 6.15 + Mesa 25.2-devel was just 29% the speed of using the NVIDIA R575 Linux driver.
The HITMAN game also ran on NVK but at just a fraction of the performance of the NVIDIA driver when using either the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER or RTX 4080 SUPER graphics cards.