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Mesa 25.2 NVK vs. NVIDIA R575 Linux Graphics Performance For GeForce RTX 40 Series


A number of Phoronix readers have been interested in seeing some fresh benchmarks of Mesa's NVK Vulkan driver in providing open-source Vulkan API support on NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards as well as the modern OpenGL approach of using Zink for layering OpenGL atop Vulkan.

With the in-development Linux 6.16 kernel there is preliminary Nouveau driver support for NVIDIA RTX 50 / Blackwell GPUs but when trying Linux 6.16 Git and the very latest firmware found in linux-firmware.git, I wasn't able to get any of my Blackwell graphics cards working on Nouveau. Using Linux 6.15 stable with the latest linux-firmware and Mesa 25.2 was working out well out-of-the-box on the GeForce RTX 40 graphics cards attempted. For the most part the RTX 40 and Nouveau/NVK experience was trouble-free and working well with various OpenGL and Vulkan games but like in DiRT Rally 2.0 were occasional texture issues around the tires, for example.

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