AMD Radeon RX 9000 Series vs. NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 Open-Source Linux Performance For 2025
DiRT Rally 2.0 on Steam Play has been a bit problematic in recent times for Nouveau/NVK but was working out with these latest Linux 6.18 + Mesa Git benchmarks. But as you can see with the Nouveau/NVK driver stack the GeForce RTX 5090 performance comes out similar to the GeForce RTX 5070 on the NVIDIA R580 graphics driver. Or the GeForce RTX 5080 on Nouveau/NVK is around the performance of the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti on R580 and to the AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT graphics card. The Radeon RX 9070 series outperform all of the RTX 50 Blackwell graphics cards tested when using the Nouveau/NVK driver stack in its current form. Of course, with the GeForce RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 graphics cards on the NVIDIA R580 official driver, their performance well surpasses the the Radeon RX 9070 XT.
With ultra quality settings, the RTX 5090 on Nouveau was hitting hangs but the other cards had worked fine on that fully open-source and upstream stack.
Unfortunately the Nouveau driver doesn't expose any GPU power consumption metrics via HWMON or similar thus only the GPU power consumption metrics for the NVIDIA R580 and AMD Linux runs.
The Nouveau / NVK driver stack has matured a lot this year for modern NVIDIA graphics cards but the performance is still short of the NVIDIA R580 driver or the AMD Radeon RX 9000 series competition. With the demanding GravityMark Vulkan benchmark, the GeForce RTX 5090 on Nouveau was short of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 on the R580 driver and of the AMD Radeon RX 9070 series graphics cards. The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 graphics cards on the R580 driver were delivering the best performance-per-Watt.
The Mesa NVK driver currently doesn't support the Vulkan ray-tracing extensions and thus a battle only between the NVIDIA official graphics driver stack and the AMD Radeon graphics cards. The RDNA4 ray-tracing performance has improved a lot this year as recently showcased but still lagging behind NVIDIA for ray-tracing competitiveness.