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As a few months have passed since our prior round of testing the fully open-source NVIDIA Linux driver stack with the Nouveau kernel driver and Mesa NVK Vulkan driver plus Zink, here is a fresh round of benchmarks using Linux 7.0 and Mesa 26.1-dev compared to the open-source stack shipped by Ubuntu 25.10 (Linux 6.17 + Mesa 25.2) for showing how far the open-source NVIDIA driver has progressed the past few months. Plus testing against the NVIDIA official Linux graphics driver for putting that Nouveau/NVK performance into perspective.

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This round of testing is to show how the Nouveau + NVK performance has evolved over the past six months since Ubuntu 25.10 as well as how that very latest open-source and upstream NVIDIA Linux graphics driver stack is comparing to the official NVIDIA driver offering, using the NVIDIA R590 driver as the latest stable driver at the time of testing. The configurations tested included:

Mesa 25.2 + Linux 6.17: The graphics stack used by Ubuntu 25.10 and Ubuntu 24.04.4 LTS HWE. That is the baseline for those currently installing Ubuntu or similar late 2025 Linux distributions.

Mesa 26.1-dev + Linux 7.0: The latest upstream open-source support as of this week for the Linux 7.0 kernel and Mesa 26.1-dev. Linux 7.0 will be found in Ubuntu 26.04 LTS while that upcoming Ubuntu release is using Mesa 26.0. Mesa 26.1 stable will be out in Q2.

NVIDIA 590.48.01: The latest stable NVIDIA Linux driver as of the testing that occured several days ago prior to the NVIDIA R595 stable debut.

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For this round of testing all the benchmarking was done on the new [4]System76 Thelio Mira desktop with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 16GB graphics card. All hardware was the same with just reconfiguring the software stack between runs as noted.

In addition to the Vulkan performance with the NVK driver, the OpenGL performance with Nouveau is tested using the Zink driver and also some OpenCL coverage too using Mesa's Rusticl driver.

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[1] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=linux-70-nouveau&image=linux7_nouveau_1_lrg

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=linux-70-nouveau&image=linux7_nouveau_2_lrg

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=linux-70-nouveau&image=linux7_nouveau_3_lrg

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/review/thelio-mira-r4-n4

[5] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=linux-70-nouveau&image=linux7_nouveau_4_lrg