NVIDIA's open-source Linux kernel drivers have matured to the point that they offer performance equivalent to their own proprietary GPU drivers.
NVIDIA Linux driver 555.58 offers great optimizations, enhancing the performance of RTX GPUs
NVIDIA's open-source Linux kernel driver has improved drastically over the past two years with now being on par with proprietary drivers when it comes to performance of the RTX Turing-based GPUs and up. The latest 555 driver series has particularly offered immense optimizations for the RTX GPUs, with its 555.58 currently being the best driver released up until now.
Phoronix recently tested the 555.58 Linux kernel driver against the latest NVIDIA's proprietary drivers and found out that the performance difference between the two is almost negligible. In all departments, professional NVIDIA RTX GPUs were able to score identical numbers with both types of drivers in computing, professional, and creator workloads. There are instances where the proprietary wins over the Linux Kernel driver marginally but the opposite is also seen a few times.
The GPUs used were the Ampere-based RTX A2000 and RTX A4000 professional graphics cards. In the compute and creator apps, there was less than a 1% difference in most benchmarks including the Chaos Group V-Ray, OctaneBench 2020.1, and many others. Surprisingly rendering in Blender 4.1 came out to be almost identical in various tests with time differences of a few milliseconds.
In professional graphics workloads, we see similar results with non-existent differences in scores as if they are almost in the margin of error. The geometric mean of all the test results showed around 1% difference in performance with both RTX A2000 and RTX A4000. Even the power consumption and temperature remained identical on both GPUs running on proprietary and open-source Linux kernel drivers.
As for gaming, Phoronix did test the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40 series graphics cards and found similar results running the gaming workloads on both open-source & proprietary kernel drivers. However, no benchmarks were uploaded to the site. That said, it's expected that the newer Nvidia 560 Linux driver series will bring more improvements, which is in its beta phase at the moment.
It's no surprise that this is the reason why NVIDIA has been promoting its Linux kernel drivers for a while and recently published a blog post on its full transition to Open-Source GPU kernel modules.
Similarly, AMD also added next-gen RDNA 4 GPU support in its Linux kernel driver, ensuring that Linux users can achieve optimal performance from the upcoming GPUs.
News Source: Phoronix
About the author: Sarfraz Khan is a hardware reporter with a focus on PC components and the builder community. With years of experience writing about PC hardware and laptops, his work has been featured on several reputable technology publications. Sarfraz's hands-on experience is demonstrated through his first-person accounts of using and comparing different hardware configurations, providing practical and relatable insights for everyday users. His technical analysis is respected by peers in the enthusiast community and has been cited by specialized hardware sites such as Germany's Igor's Lab.
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