In addition to the open-source NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver in Mesa [1]merging compression support for big performance wins , another performance optimization was merged earlier in the week that stand to benefit GeForce RTX 20 "Turing" graphics processors.

The NVK driver's NAK compiler saw an improvement merged that stands to benefit Turing GPUs the most. The [2]nak: Use the hardware's max warps_per_sm value should help Turing GPUs with games running lots of compute work on the GPU.

This change should now propagate the correct warps per SM value for various Turing GPUs to help with optimal performance, but no performance numbers were shared as part of the merge request.

In any event there continues to be a lot of ongoing and exciting Nouveau/NVK open-source NVIDIA driver improvements that should make for an exciting next round of benchmarks. For those that missed the recent tests, see [3]NVIDIA GTX 980 Through RTX 5080: Open-Source Nouveau/Mesa Drivers vs. NVIDIA 580 Linux Drivers and for a competitive analysis with [4]AMD Radeon RX 9000 Series vs. NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 Open-Source Linux Performance For 2025 .



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Mesa-26.0-NVK-Compression

[2] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/38913

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvidia-980-5080-linux

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/review/nvk-nvidia-radeon-eoy2025