Nouveau vs. NVIDIA R595 Linux Driver For Workstation Graphics Performance

Written by Michael Larabel in Display Drivers on 6 May 2026 at 12:00 PM EDT. Page 5 of 5. 22 Comments.

With the Nouveau driver stack not supporting NVIDIA's CUDA (obviously), that leaves the Vulkan back-end if wanting to make use of Llama.cpp with NVIDIA hardware on the fully open-source driver stack.

👁 Llama.cpp benchmark with settings of Backend: Vulkan, Model: Qwen3.5-9B-Q8_0, Test: Text Generation 128. NVIDIA R595 was the fastest.

👁 Llama.cpp benchmark with settings of Backend: Vulkan, Model: gpt-oss-20b-Q8_0, Test: Text Generation 128. NVIDIA R595 was the fastest.

👁 Llama.cpp benchmark with settings of Backend: Vulkan, Model: Qwen3.5-9B-Q8_0, Test: Prompt Processing 2048. NVIDIA R595 was the fastest.

👁 Llama.cpp benchmark with settings of Backend: Vulkan, Model: gpt-oss-20b-Q8_0, Test: Prompt Processing 2048. NVIDIA R595 was the fastest.

👁 Llama.cpp benchmark with settings of Backend: Vulkan, Model: GLM-4.7-Flash-IQ4_XS, Test: Text Generation 128. NVIDIA R595 was the fastest.

👁 Llama.cpp benchmark with settings of Backend: Vulkan, Model: MiniMax-M2.5-UD-TQ1_0, Test: Text Generation 128. NVIDIA R595 was the fastest.

👁 Llama.cpp benchmark with settings of Backend: Vulkan, Model: GLM-4.7-Flash-IQ4_XS, Test: Prompt Processing 2048. NVIDIA R595 was the fastest.

👁 Llama.cpp benchmark with settings of Backend: Vulkan, Model: Llama-3.1-Tulu-3-8B-Q8_0, Test: Text Generation 128. NVIDIA R595 was the fastest.

👁 Llama.cpp benchmark with settings of Backend: Vulkan, Model: MiniMax-M2.5-UD-TQ1_0, Test: Prompt Processing 2048. NVIDIA R595 was the fastest.

👁 Llama.cpp benchmark with settings of Backend: Vulkan, Model: Llama-3.1-Tulu-3-8B-Q8_0, Test: Prompt Processing 2048. NVIDIA R595 was the fastest.

👁 Llama.cpp benchmark with settings of Backend: Vulkan, Model: Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3-Q8_0, Test: Text Generation 128. NVIDIA R595 was the fastest.

👁 Llama.cpp benchmark with settings of Backend: Vulkan, Model: Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3-Q8_0, Test: Prompt Processing 2048. NVIDIA R595 was the fastest.

👁 Llama.cpp benchmark with settings of Backend: Vulkan, Model: DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B-Q8_0, Test: Text Generation 128. NVIDIA R595 was the fastest.

👁 Llama.cpp benchmark with settings of Backend: Vulkan, Model: DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B-Q8_0, Test: Prompt Processing 2048. NVIDIA R595 was the fastest.

In best case scenarios Llama.cpp with the NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Max-Q with Nouveau/Mesa-26.2-devel was approaching 70% the performance of the NVIDIA R595 driver but more often than not Nouveau with Llama.cpp was at 50% or less.

Again, 99% of NVIDIA Linux users are best off using the NVIDIA official (currently R595 series) packaged Linux driver stack for the best performance and features, but for those curious about Nouveau + Mesa NVK, it has come a long ways in recent years since beginning to make use of the NVIDIA GSP. The performance can be satisfactory in some scenarios or at the very least is a much better initial out-of-the-box experience until installing the official NVIDIA Linux driver package. With that said, NVK continues to make interesting progress within Mesa and it will be interesting to see how the Nova kernel driver ultimately plays out with NVIDIA continuing to invest significantly into that upstream kernel driver to succeed Nouveau.

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Nouveau vs. NVIDIA R595 Linux Driver For Workstation Graphics Performance