Nouveau is not appropriate for gaming. NVK is potentially a contender for the RTX and above cards, but it's still in development, so YMMV greatly.

Otherwise, you're stuck with the proprietary drivers. You might see about installing an X11 session, though. I believe Bazzite installs both Wayland and X11 for Nvidia users for this reason.

I have for the past half year. I don't have numbers, but rolling with the NVK vulkan driver (context for the unaware [1]) on mesa's main branch gets me somewhere around half the proprietary driver's performance on average, and can be accompanied with stutters if it is a heavy bottleneck (turning down the resolution is an easy way out). Most games I've tried are runnable now.

It sounds like you're looking for more performance with this post though, so you're likely not going to see improvements taking this route. I would still suggest giving it a try for people that are able and can tolerate the sacrifice. It's good enough for me (and better in the wayland case) that I rarely swap to the proprietary driver anymore.

Mesa has a tracker issue for games on NVK [2] [3] with reports about game statuses and issues from the past 5 months. It includes playable and unplayable games for those interested in gauging its usability.

Also, for the record, NVK is no longer considered experimental as of mesa 24.1 (May of this year) [4].

[1] https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/nvk-has-landed.html

[2] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RuHD3Z_nBKCp618HHC5I9hOu0lqCoFYwQ4FM69M-Ajg/edit?gid=469568508#gid=469568508

[3] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/11066

[4] https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/nvk-is-now-ready-for-prime-time.html

Not on my Arch laptop, no. That one has an AMD Radeon card. My gaming PC has NVidia but I haven't tried it there yet.