AMD Radeon RX 9000 Series vs. NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 Open-Source Linux Performance For 2025
Here is the GPU power consumption data across the entire span of benchmarks conducted. Again, no Nouveau power readings with the driver not currently exposing any data via HWMON or similar interfaces.
Lastly the current geo mean breakdown for all of the benchmarks conducted where they successfully ran on all of the graphics cards (e.g. not the Vulkan ray-tracing benchmarks for the lack of Nouveau driver support).
The Nouveau/NVK driver stack improved a lot over the course of 2025 for performance, implementing more Vulkan extensions, fixes, etc. It will be interesting to see where 2026 goes with the in-development Nova Rust kernel DRM driver and continued improvements to the NVK Mesa driver. Hopefully Vulkan ray-tracing performance comes about well for NVK and that timely open-source driver support continues for next-gen NVIDIA GPUs. For now at least the Radeon RX 9000 series remains ideal for those wanting a fully open-source driver stack from kernel space to user-space, unless you don't need Vulkan ray-tracing support and don't mind paying GeForce RTX 5090 prices to get RTX 5070~5080 levels of performance on Nouveau/NVK compared to using the R580 driver.
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