February 12, 2013 -- In this article are benchmarks of the past two Ubuntu Long-Term Support releases (Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS and Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS) compared to the latest Ubuntu 13.04 development state. Being looked at specifically for this round of testing is the AMD Radeon Linux graphics performance with the latest open-source driver compared to an older Catalyst driver. For an AMD Radeon HD 4800 series graphics card, the current state of the open-source graphics driver on Linux is beginning to outperform an old AMD Catalyst driver from 2010 for select Linux OpenGL games.

February 08, 2013 -- Last week I delivered benchmarks showing Mesa 9.1 delivers faster Intel OpenGL graphics. The benchmarks in that article were carried out on an Intel Core i7 "Ivy Bridge" system with HD 4000 graphics while since then there have been many requests to have similar tests done on a previous-generation Sandy Bridge system. As a result of those requests, here are benchmarks of an Intel Core i5 "Sandy Bridge" processor with Intel HD 3000 graphics as the Mesa 9.1 performance is compared to the earlier 9.0.2, 8.0.5, and 7.11.2 branches.

February 06, 2013 -- After last week delivering benchmarks that showed Intel graphics being faster with Mesa 9.1 relative to earlier Mesa 3D releases, up today are benchmarks of Radeon Gallium3D (R600g) to compare the Mesa 9.1 performance to Mesa 9.0.2, 8.0.5, and 7.11.2.

February 01, 2013 -- Last week benchmarks were delivered on Phoronix that showed the Intel DRM GPU driver performance between the Linux 3.2 and 3.8 kernels. In this article are similar benchmarks of the Radeon DRM driver in recent kernel releases using AMD graphics hardware but going back only to the Linux 3.4 kernel due to show-stopping issues.

January 30, 2013 -- With Mesa 9.1 nearing its release next month and having been branched from master as of this week, here are some new benchmarks looking at the Intel HD 4000 "Ivy Bridge" graphics performance when testing Mesa 9.1-devel Git to Mesa 9.0.2, 8.0.5, and 7.11.2. Overall, Mesa 9.1 delivers an OpenGL performance boost for the latest-generation Intel hardware.

January 27, 2013 -- With the Intel Haswell product launch coming up soon, here's a look at how the Intel "Ivy Bridge" HD 4000 graphics support has matured on the seven most recent Linux kernel releases. This benchmarking shows how the performance of the Intel DRM driver has changed between the Linux 3.2 kernel and the Linux 3.8 kernel that's presently under development when using the integrated graphics found on the latest-generation Core i7 CPU.

January 21, 2013 -- Earlier this month I ran some new benchmarks of the Radeon Gallium3D MSAA support that was merged into the R300g driver. Unfortunately, the performance was very disappointing, but last week there were luckily some anti-aliasing performance optimizations that were merged into Mesa. I have now done new benchmarks of the new Mesa R300g driver with these multi-sample anti-aliasing performance optimizations, which show quite a noticeable difference from the open-source driver compared to earlier this month.

January 18, 2013 -- It's been quite a while since delivering any Linux graphics benchmarks of the NVIDIA ION, the platform for pairing integrated NVIDIA graphics with an Intel Atom processor for small form factor PCs. While NVIDIA's ION is basically defunct, for those still having a nettop or netbook that's ION-based, here's a performance comparison of the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics between the open-source Nouveau driver and the NVIDIA 310.xx binary Linux graphics driver.

January 15, 2013 -- Last week benchmarks were delivered of the AMD Radeon R300g with MSAA, after the much-used feature was finally implemented in a proper and working state for this open-source graphics driver. Coming out today are new Morphological Anti-Aliasing (MLAA) benchmarks from this Gallium3D driver to compare to the Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing results.

January 11, 2013 -- With the GeForce 600 "Kepler" graphics cards now working on Nouveau in an out-of-the-box manner with OpenGL acceleration, here's a brief five-way NVIDIA GeForce graphics card comparison when using the Nouveau open-source driver with the Linux 3.8 kernel and Mesa 9.1-devel.