According to Nvidia's announcement, starting with the R560 release, the open source version of the Linux GPU kernel drivers will be installed by default. Although this version was made available in 2022, it did not yet support consumer GPUs. Despite this, both the open and closed source drivers are said to perform similarly.
Going forward, Nvidia states that the open source drivers will be the default option during installation from the R560 release onwards. If installing from a .run file, the open source modules will be installed by default as long as all Nvidia GPUs in the system support them. These drivers are compatible with video cards based on Turing or later architectures.
While it will still be possible to choose the closed source variant of the Linux kernel drivers, Nvidia notes that some GPUs may only be supported by the open source release. The R560 version of the driver is expected to be released later this year. Two years ago, Nvidia first made the Linux drivers for its video cards available as open source, with a focus on data center GPUs as the open source code for GeForce and workstation cards was considered 'alpha quality' at the time. Earlier this year, these GPUs were 'certified' for the first time as part of R550 to be used with the open source modules. According to benchmarks from Phoronix, the open source drivers now perform nearly as well as the closed source versions for consumer cards.
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