Initial Benchmarks Of The "NVK" Open-Source NVIDIA Vulkan Driver

With the in-development NVK driver merged for Mesa 23.3 to provide open-source NVIDIA Vulkan API support when paired with the Nouveau kernel driver and the necessary Nouveau kernel driver improvements coming with Linux 6.6 for supporting this driver, Phoronix readers have been eager for some benchmarks... Well, here are some benchmarks on the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20 and RTX 30 series when comparing the latest NVK+Nouveau code compared to the proprietary NVIDIA Linux graphics driver stack.

Before getting to the results, it's important to note that the NVK Vulkan driver is still under active development and not really usable yet for enthusiasts and Linux gamers... It's great if you want to get involved with Nouveau/NVK development or help in testing things out, but for actual day-to-day use it's still undergoing significant work and enabling more Vulkan functionality. With that said, some games are already running on NVK.

However, the elephant in the room is the performance... As with the Nouveau NVC0 Gallium3D driver for OpenGL, the primary bottleneck of the open-source Nouveau driver stack is the very slow performance due to the GeForce GTX 900 series and newer being limited to the boot clock frequencies. Until the power management / GPU re-clocking is sorted out, the OpenGL and Vulkan performance will be severely limited. Nouveau developers at Red Hat are working on enabling NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP) support to overcome the power management challenges that have plagued the Nouveau driver for years. However, the Nouveau GSP code hasn't yet been queued so there still may be more waiting until this is sorted out. Until then the best Nouveau driver support in general is with the GeForce GTX 700 series.

With the NVK driver they plan to support NVIDIA graphics hardware back to the GTX 700 series, but for the moment the support is focused on the GeForce RTX 2000 "Turing" graphics processors and newer. The support basically boils down to the RTX 20/30 series. Nouveau kernel driver support for the GeForce RTX 40 GPUs will come with the ongoing GSP enablement work.

So with that said and being well aware of the current limitations, on a few RTX 20/30 graphics cards, I did run a few benchmarks just to satisfy all hose that this week have been requesting said tests. The graphics cards tested were the RTX 2060, RTX 3060 Ti, and RTX 3070 Ti cards. Tests were done on Mesa 23.3-devel Git this week running the drm-misc-next kernel and then when running the NVIDIA 535.98 proprietary driver stack.