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 3 of 5. 16 Comments.

The lack of re-clocking makes the Nouveau driver support very poor for the GeForce GTX 900 and GTX 1000 series. When NVIDIA EOL'ed the Kelper GPU support at least there with the GTX 700 series is re-clocking to allow for better performance than the boot clock speeds. For anyone still on second-gen Maxwell or Pascal, you really will want to stick to using the NVIDIA legacy driver branch.

VKMark saw Nouveau outperforming the NVIDIA 580 driver on Turing and newer for that synthetic Vulkan benchmark but painful results with the GTX 980 and GTX 1080 series.

For Vulkan compute performance, the newer NVIDIA GPUs with the GPU System Processor offer decent performance relative to the NVIDIA 580 official driver while the GTX 980 / 1080 performance out-of-the-box with Nouveau remains atrocious.

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