Open-Source Nouveau+NVK vs. NVIDIA 580 Linux Gaming/Graphics & Compute Driver Performance
The ViennaCL benchmarks show some additional OpenCL compute areas where NVK+Rusticl can be competitive to NVIDIA's OpenCL driver and other areas where there are gaps to fill.
If taking the geo mean of all the benchmarks conducted for both OpenGL and Vulkan graphics and OpenCL compute, here is the end result. From Ubuntu 25.10 to Linux 6.18 + Mesa 26.0-dev are some definite nice improvements to see for both the RTX 40 Ada and RTX 50 Blackwell graphics cards tested. The GeForce RTX 5080 geo mean improved by 20% going to that open-source NVIDIA driver code from more recently. But even with those latest improvements, the RTX 5080 geo mean on Nouveau+NVK was around 50% the performance of the NVIDIA 580 official Linux graphics driver. Similarly for the GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER and RTX 4080 SUPER graphics cards tested they were battling for around half the performance of the official NVIDIA Linux graphics driver stack. But at least the fully open-source NVIDIA driver stack continues moving in the right direction.
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