The Rogers PieFed InstanceOpen-Source Nouveau+NVK vs. NVIDIA 580 Linux Gaming/Graphics & Compute Driver Performance
www.phoronix.com/review/nvidia-nvk-linux-618-me…
This Black Friday is an in-depth look at the current performance of the open-source NVIDIA Linux driver stack with the Nouveau kernel driver (the Nova driver not yet being ready for end-users) paired with the latest Mesa NVK driver for open-source Vulkan API support. With that NVK Vulkan driver is also looking at the OpenGL performance using the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver used now for OpenGL on modern NVIDIA GPUs rather than maintaining the Nouveau Gallium3D driver. Plus the Rusticl driver for OpenCL compute atop the NVK driver. This fully open-source and latest NVIDIA Linux driver support was compared to NVIDIA’s official 580 series Linux driver. Both RTX 40 Ada and RTX 50 Blackwell graphics cards were tested for this thorough GPU driver comparison
0 Comments
Comments from other communities
Nouveau is really only meant for compatibility, and that’s all it was ever really designed for. The base driver struggles to play even the most basic accelerated games, but the NVK hook has a shocking amount of performance gain, considering. Once they get some memory optimizations and Cuda hooks in there, this could be a decent contender for not having to mess with Nvidia’s module stack, honestly.
ashx64I disagree with that. The main problem is that Nouveau was stagnant for years because it just wasn’t feasible to use since NVIDIA blocked reclocking support, so it would only ever run at its base clock, resulting in terrible performance. So nobody wanted to use the drivers, all that mattered is that they worked well enough to let users install the proprietary drivers.
But now that NVIDIA allows reclocking again, there’s actual reason to improve the performance and fix bugs in it.