NVIDIA R550 Linux Driver's Open Kernel Modules Performing Well On GeForce GPUs

While running Blender 4.0 the proprietary kernel driver seemed to yield slightly better performance. It was just fractions of a second but was rather consistently showing the proprietary driver having that slight advantage here, unlike in other workloads.

Overall the NVIDIA R550 open kernel modules were in good shape for the GeForce RTX 40 graphics cards tested. I didn't encounter any troubles with the performance and the power consumption was also typically the same. There was the small advantage too that during periods of brief downtime using the open kernel driver appeared to deliver slightly lower GPU power consumption than the proprietary driver.

Here's the GPU power numbers over the hours of benchmarking of each GPU/driver combination. Those interested can see all my comparison benchmarks in full here.

Across gaming and GPU compute workloads, the NVIDIA open kernel driver with the v550 series was working out well on the GeForce consumer graphics cards tested. It will be interesting to see if/when NVIDIA ends up transitioning to the open kernel driver by default for consumer hardware and if future NVIDIA GPUs only end up being enabled along the open driver route.