Open-Source Nouveau+NVK vs. NVIDIA 580 Linux Gaming/Graphics & Compute Driver Performance
First up was the Vulkan GravityMark benchmark that is quite demanding on modern GPUs. NVK fortunately is working out well with GravityMark, except for Vulkan ray-tracing due to NVK not yet supporting the ray-tracing extensions. We see that Nouveau/NVK has improved quite nicely from the Ubuntu 25.10 out-of-the-box state to the Linux 6.18 + Mesa 26.0-dev state. However, even with these open-source NVIDIA driver improvements, the performance is still around half the performance of the official NVIDIA 580 Linux driver.
With GravityMark at 4K, the latest Nouveau/NVK driver performance on the GeForce RTX 5080 and GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER were just 40% the speed of the NVIDIA 580 Linux driver.
With 3DMark Wild Life Extreme the Nouveau/NVK performance improved quite nicely from the default Ubuntu 25.10 state. Here the RTX 5080 Blackwell graphics card on Nouveau/NVK was up to 63% the performance of the NVIDIA 580 Linux driver.
At 4K, the RTX 5080 was at 60% the performance of the NVIDIA 580 driver when using Linux 6.18 and Mesa 26.0-dev.
With the game Batman: Arkham Knight running under Steam Play, the latest NVK driver code was less than 40% the speed of the NVIDIA 580 Linux driver.