Not sure how much this is said or whats going on, but I am pretty disappointed in NVIDIA. There is ZERO reason I should have an RTX 5090 paying $3k-4k and not have fully functional and working NVIDIA drivers with full performance across the board for gaming and development on Ubuntu / Linux as good as Windows. There is no reason for NVIDIA to only optimize drivers for Windows over Linux for GPU’s in 2026. Just tried Resident Evil requiem with horrible performance and vertex issues, so I end up having to dual boot just to play this game. It is now 3 days out and the Windows NVIDIA driver was already updated immediately, while Linux has yet to get any update for new features and performance improvement for the same issues. I also have to struggle with fully working Wayland compatability because the devs of NVIDIA do not want to fully support GBM (Generic Buffer Management), and possibly other things. It’s absolutely insane to be discussing this and having this issue still in 2026. When will there be full consistent support and driver updates without gpu limitations? When will full GPU performance be utilized as good as Windows for all software by default. I am on Ubuntu 24.04
- regarding gaming perf on Linux+NV, you may find this thread informative: DirectX12 performance is terrible on Linux
The good news is that the upcoming driver is supposed to fix it. - regarding Wayland issues, Wayland itself is known to be unstable and on top of this combination Wayland+Nvidia is basically asking for trouble. This is a multilayered problem, NV drivers is just one of the factors.
- generally speaking, due to driver issues IMHO NV cards on Linux should not be considered as display devices at all, only as accelerators.
Answering your question “When will full GPU performance be utilized as good as Windows for all software by default”: probably when desktop Linux reaches ~30% market share, things will start to improve slowly from then on.
That is some giga tier copium right here
Wayland isnt unstable, its a protocol that is implemented by individual compositors. You may have a specific compositor that can be problematic but WAYLAND isnt unstable and Nvidia has had many years to reach the point every single other GPU has with Wayland support and has failed to do so and for a time out right refused.
I have never once had a problem on Gnome or KDE wayland sessions on anything but Nvidia GPUs in the past 10yrs. There is a reason some of the wayland compositors just wont support Nvidia issues and its not just blind Nvidia hate.
Dont get me wrong, all vendors have their issues but Nvidia very specifically didnt want to play ball with the rest of the kids until very recently when it comes to wayland.
People have been complaining about Nvidia drivers now since atleast Ada. Everyone knows. I’ve brought up full lists of multiple driver threads and they’re largely ignored.
The reality is that NVIDIA’s Unix drivers have not been developed for gaming for many years. Instead, they were focused on professional visualization (workstation) applications, and later HPC/GPU compute/AI. This is why gaming is pretty mediocre on NVIDIA right now, while on the other hand, applications like Blender and various CUDA compute workloads are best in class. You should look at NVIDIA’s Unix support situation from this lens.
(NVIDIA isn’t the only GPU vendor with this issue regarding gaming btw; Intel’s drivers, while great for general use on Linux, lack the gaming-specific optimizations they have on Windows, so performance lags a lot there as well.)
That said, in recent years, NVIDIA has been focusing on gaming more. You can see this if you hang around the forum; they have a team of employees reproducing issues reported by users and filing bugs so they can get fixed. They’re also hiring software engineers with open source graphics and gaming tech stack knowledge, so they’re clearly investing in this area now.
In light of this, I suggest you take a collaborative approach: If you hit a specific issue, then post a report while following best practices like providing a clear description of the issue, reliable repro steps, and a bug report file attached. If you provide high quality reports, I think there is a good chance NVIDIA will put them to good use.
the problem is collaboration is a 2 way street and when bug reports are given there is an abysmally low amount of communication in return. It isnt like Mesa gitlab or kernel bugzilla where people actually collaborate on issues and we actively see things resolved.
There are so many issues i see around this forum and the windows side that see a single real reply or none at all that can you really blame anyone for feeling theyre just screaming into the void or that they have to be a bit exaggerated to even be noticed? OSS devs (not all, but many) do such an infinitely better job at actually having a back and forth collaboration and they do it for a fraction of the pay or none at all. If Nvidia wants to see this sort of thing too they absolutely must engage the community in an open an meaningful way and they simply havent done that.