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 5 of 10. 39 Comments.

👁 Llama.cpp benchmark with settings of Backend: Vulkan, Model: Qwen3-8B-Q8_0, Test: Text Generation 128. RTX 5080: NVIDIA 580 was the fastest.

Moving to Vulkan compute performance with Llama.cpp, the text generation performance started out quite positive. The Nouveau/NVK driver performance has evolved quite nicely with the latest Git code and isn't too far behind the NVIDIA 580 driver performance.

👁 Llama.cpp benchmark with settings of Backend: Vulkan, Model: Qwen3-8B-Q8_0, Test: Prompt Processing 512. RTX 5080: NVIDIA 580 was the fastest.

👁 Llama.cpp benchmark with settings of Backend: Vulkan, Model: Qwen3-8B-Q8_0, Test: Prompt Processing 1024. RTX 5080: NVIDIA 580 was the fastest.

👁 Llama.cpp benchmark with settings of Backend: Vulkan, Model: Qwen3-8B-Q8_0, Test: Prompt Processing 2048. RTX 5080: NVIDIA 580 was the fastest.

Moving to prompt processing with Qwen3 8B, the NVK performance gap becomes huge compared to the NVIDIA 580 Vulkan driver. At the same time though it was fascinating to see the latest NVK Git code performing multiple times better than NVK as shipped by Ubuntu 25.10.

👁 Llama.cpp benchmark with settings of Backend: Vulkan, Model: gpt-oss-20b-Q8_0, Test: Text Generation 128. RTX 5080: NVIDIA 580 was the fastest.

👁 Llama.cpp benchmark with settings of Backend: Vulkan, Model: gpt-oss-20b-Q8_0, Test: Prompt Processing 512. RTX 5080: NVIDIA 580 was the fastest.

👁 Llama.cpp benchmark with settings of Backend: Vulkan, Model: gpt-oss-20b-Q8_0, Test: Prompt Processing 1024. RTX 5080: NVIDIA 580 was the fastest.

👁 Llama.cpp benchmark with settings of Backend: Vulkan, Model: gpt-oss-20b-Q8_0, Test: Prompt Processing 2048. RTX 5080: NVIDIA 580 was the fastest.

When running GPT-OSS 20B with Vulkan using Llama.cpp, there was nice gains made using the latest Nouveau/NVK open-source driver code but especially for prompt processing is still very substantial differences for NVK vs. NVIDIA Vulkan.

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URL: https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvidia-nvk-linux-618-mesa-26/5

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

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