NVK Vulkan Performance Improving With Mesa 26.2 Against NVIDIA Proprietary Driver
([Nouveau] 2 Hours Ago
NVK Mesa 26.2 Performance)
- Reference: 0001647161
- News link: https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVK-Mesa-26.2-Performance
- Source link:
The performance of the Nouveau kernel driver with the Mesa NVK Vulkan driver continues to improve each feature release in its quest toward better competing with NVIDIA's official Linux graphics driver with its proprietary Vulkan driver.
Red Hat engineer Karol Herbst who is known for his Nouveau and Rusticl contributions over the years shared some new benchmark figures provided by NVK contributor Phomes. Herbst noted in a [1]Mastodon post that there is steady progress with Mesa 26.2 Git compared to the performance of Mesa 26.1 stable.
There are results from the proprietary NVIDIA Vulkan driver too with the Mesa 26.2 making some headway in closing the cap, but for most games there still is a significant difference in performance of Nouveau+NVK compared to the official NVIDIA driver.
With Serious Sam 2017, the NVK performance is extremely close to the NVIDIA proprietary driver while in newer games a larger delta remains. In any event it's been quite fascinating to see how well NVK has matured these past few years and will be interesting to see what more optimizations land in H2'2026. Plus with the modern Nova kernel driver continuing to be developed by NVIDIA and other parties, that will likely be of help too for better performance with NVK in due time.
[1] https://chaos.social/@karolherbst/116936716286227167
Red Hat engineer Karol Herbst who is known for his Nouveau and Rusticl contributions over the years shared some new benchmark figures provided by NVK contributor Phomes. Herbst noted in a [1]Mastodon post that there is steady progress with Mesa 26.2 Git compared to the performance of Mesa 26.1 stable.
There are results from the proprietary NVIDIA Vulkan driver too with the Mesa 26.2 making some headway in closing the cap, but for most games there still is a significant difference in performance of Nouveau+NVK compared to the official NVIDIA driver.
With Serious Sam 2017, the NVK performance is extremely close to the NVIDIA proprietary driver while in newer games a larger delta remains. In any event it's been quite fascinating to see how well NVK has matured these past few years and will be interesting to see what more optimizations land in H2'2026. Plus with the modern Nova kernel driver continuing to be developed by NVIDIA and other parties, that will likely be of help too for better performance with NVK in due time.
[1] https://chaos.social/@karolherbst/116936716286227167