Driving an AE86 apparently feels just like using wayland with NVIDIA

Not really no, there's a factor of almost 4x in performance between the top cards (my use case specifically being GPU rendering in Blender using Optix or HIP)

https://opendata.blender.org/benchmarks/query/?device_name=AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX&device_name=NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090&compute_type=CUDA&compute_type=HIP&compute_type=METAL&compute_type=ONEAPI&compute_type=OPTIX&operating_system=Linux&blender_version=3.6.0&group_by=device_name