NVIDIA GTX 980 Through RTX 5080: Open-Source Nouveau/Mesa Drivers vs. NVIDIA 580 Linux Drivers

Written by Michael Larabel in Display Drivers on 11 December 2025 at 11:10 AM EST. Page 2 of 5. 16 Comments.

With the demanding GravityMark Vulkan benchmark when using Nouveau + Mesa NVK on the recent generation GPUs you can get around half the performance (sans the RTX 4080 with no working display output on Linux 6.18 Nouveau). But with the GTX 980 Ti and GTX 1080 you are getting just a few frames per second due to being crippled to the boot clock frequencies. That handicap has long been known and unfortunate for the open-source driver support on the GTX 900 and GTX 1000 series hardware.

Running the Linux-native 3DMark Wild Life Extreme gets decent performance with the NVK driver on T uring and newer compared to the NVIDIA 580 driver but again basically useless open-source performance for the Maxwell2 and Pascal GPUs.

Thanks to Nouveau leveraging the GPU System Processor (GSP) on the Turing GPUs and newer, the performance is relatively decent compared to the NVIDIA 580 Linux driver but with the GTX 980 Ti and GTX 1080 can't push out more than a few FPS.

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