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URL: https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvidia-nvk-linux-618-mesa-26/3

⇱ Open-Source Nouveau+NVK vs. NVIDIA 580 Linux Gaming/Graphics & Compute Driver Performance - Phoronix

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Open-Source Nouveau+NVK vs. NVIDIA 580 Linux Gaming/Graphics & Compute Driver Performance

Written by Michael Larabel in Display Drivers on 28 November 2025 at 10:44 AM EST. Page 3 of 10. 39 Comments.

With the DiRT Rally 2.0 racing game running under Steam Play, there were occasional stability problems on Linux 6.18 + Mesa 26.0-dev NVK. The performance overall for NVK was around 60% the performance of the NVIDIA 580 driver.

With the HITMAN game under Steam Play there were some nice improvements going from Ubuntu 25.10 to Linux 6.18 + Mesa 26.0-dev, except for the RTX 4070 SUPER that was exhibiting stability issues. Though even with that latest "NVK Git" state, the open-source performance was at around 45% the performance of the NVIDIA 580 driver on the same hardware.

With the Tesseract open-source game running on NVK+Zink, the performance was around half the speed of the NVIDIA 580 driver for this basic game.

With the more demanding Unigine Heaven OpenGL benchmark, the NVK+Zink performance was remarkably well compared to the NVIDIA 580 Linux driver. The fully open-source driver stack was at more than 70% the performance of the NVIDIA 580 driver!