NVIDIA GTX 980 Through RTX 5080: Open-Source Nouveau/Mesa Drivers vs. NVIDIA 580 Linux Drivers
When taking the geometric mean of all the benchmarks that successfully run on all of the graphics cards, here is the breakdown across that mix of OpenGL, Vulkan, and OpenCL workloads.
The GeForce RTX 5080 on Nouveau+Mesa is at 59% the speed of the NVIDIA 580 driver in this particular set of benchmarks. The NVIDIA RTX 3080 Ti is at 46% the performance of the official NVIDIA 580 driver in the same set of benchmarks. And the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER was at 42% the speed of the NVIDIA 580 driver. The NVIDIA GTX 980 Ti and GTX 1080 had very frustrating POST issues with this modern AMD AM5 system but simply going off the Nouveau results you can see how slow they are in being bound to their out-of-the-box boot clock frequencies... Going from the GTX 1080 to GTX 2080 SUPER meant 8.5x the performance thanks to that Turing GPU with the NVIDIA GSP support able to properly hit its rated clock frequencies.
For those on a GeForce GTX 900 / GTX 1000 series graphics card, you're best off sticking to the NVIDIA 580 driver series rather than dabbling around with the open-source Nouveau driver support to the unfortunate state of those cards on the upstream open-source driver. At least with newer NVIDIA GPUs -- including the latest GeForce RTX 50 series -- it's a much better story from the open-source perspective.
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