For At Least One Game, Mesa's NVK Driver Can Outperform NVIDIA's Proprietary Driver

In at least one game running on Linux via Proton Experimental, the Mesa NVK open-source Vulkan driver paired with the latest Nouveau reverse-engineered kernel driver is delivering better performance than NVIDIA's proprietary Linux graphics driver.

Pierre-Loup Griffais of Valve's Linux team shared this weekend that on his system he's found one game (Hat In Time) where the Mesa NVK driver delivers better performance than NVIDIA's official proprietary driver. He tweeted:

Decided to try it.. Hat in Time 1080p, Very High, VSync OFF. NVK is vulkan-nouveau-git gddf2ca4, on kernel 6.7.0-rc5-1-mainline. Blob is 545.29.06. 3995WX+RTX3090. Proton Experimental.

NVK: 210FPS
Blob: 165FPS

Cpu-bound, but still :-)

Yes, it's a rather CPU bound scenario with running this lightweight game powered by Unreal Engine 3 running at 1080p with a GeForce RTX 3090, but an accomplishment nevertheless. Along with the Mesa NVK code this is depending upon the Nouveau GSP support merged in Linux 6.7 along with the signed GSP firmware binary blobs for allowing proper power management / re-clocking on the RTX 20/30/40 series hardware.

It's a nice step but for most demanding games the proprietary NVIDIA Linux driver for the time being will be much more capable and faster, not to mention supporting RTX and many other features and capabilities not yet found with the community-driven open-source NVIDIA Linux driver support.

It's on my TODO list to deliver numerous NVIDIA vs. NVK benchmarks soon.