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 4 of 5. 16 Comments.
The Rusticl Gallium3D driver does provide OpenCL 3.0 support for NVIDIA GPUs on Nouveau though the performance is mixed relative to the official NVIDIA 580 driver. And with Nouveau is no CUDA support either.
The OpenCL Kernel latency with Rusticl remains much higher than the NVIDIA official OpenCL driver.
👁 ViennaCL benchmark with settings of Test: OpenCL BLAS, sDOT. RTX 4080: NVIDIA 580 was the fastest.
The Rusticl OpenCL performance on the RTX 2080 and newer can be decent for some workloads relative to the NVIDIA 580 driver but the Maxwell and Pascal support struggles due to the lack of re-clocking support on Nouveau.