October 15, 2008 -- X Server 1.5 was officially released last month with X.Org 7.4, but there had been server pre-releases going back to earlier this year. Fedora 9 had even shipped with an early version version of X Server 1.5. For those using the open-source X.Org drivers, running the latest server is not a big deal, but those with ATI or NVIDIA binary drivers they sometimes can be slow in supporting the latest version. NVIDIA has supported X Server 1.5 for a number of weeks now, but ATI has yet to update their Catalyst Linux driver with such support. With Ubuntu 8.10 being released in two weeks and it's using this newest X Server, how will ATI graphics cards be supported? Well, an interesting event has occurred and we will tell you what has happened in this article.

October 13, 2008 -- The last release of the xf86-video-radeonhd driver was version 1.2.1 and that happened back in April. Since then we have seen a plethora of new work go into this open-source ATI driver for the Radeon R500 series and later. We've seen the driver add support for AMD's 780G Chipset and most notably it has adopted AtomBIOS to be used on the Radeon HD 4800 series and newer. There have also been numerous other improvements to this driver that currently competes with the xf86-video-ati driver. With much of this work now being settled, the Novell development team has released the RadeonHD 1.2.2 driver. In addition, they pushed out the RadeonHD 1.2.3 driver just moments later, which introduces their Command Submission infrastructure.

October 09, 2008 -- Introduced in the Catalyst 8.8 Linux driver and further stabilized within Catalyst 8.9 was AMD's MultiView technology. MultiView makes it possible to use multiple GPUs on the same system not for Linux CrossFire but for driving multiple display heads. Using MultiView on Linux you can easily drive four, six, or even eight screens. In fact, up to 32 displays are theoretically supported on a single system (permitting you have enough graphics cards and PCI Express slots). MultiView also allows for OpenGL acceleration across all displays and does not rely upon Xinerama. In this article we are taking a brief look at this multi-GPU multi-monitor feature catered towards AMD's workstation customers.

October 07, 2008 -- Over the course of the past few months we have seen several NVIDIA Linux drivers that have all been marked as beta with the last official release appearing in April. Today though NVIDIA has released the 177.80 Linux driver, which is an official update and christens the changes made with the 177.67, 177.68, 170.70, 177.76, and 177.78 beta drivers. Among the changes are RENDER extension improvements, finally officially supporting the GeForce GTX series, text rendering fixes, and there are 25 official changes in total.

October 01, 2008 -- Earlier this year Fedora 9 was the first distribution providing kernel-based mode-setting (or KMS for short). At the time there was only a kernel mode-setting driver for Intel hardware and it ended up being disabled by default. We had provided a preview of kernel-based mode-setting that showed how the system display looked when it came to the flicker-free boot experience, fast and clean VT switching, and the technical advantages this method provides over the graphics mode-setting within an X.Org DDX driver. With months having passed since our first article and Red Hat engineers working aggressively on KMS improvements for Fedora 10, we are providing another look at this technology and some of the recent advancements.

September 19, 2008 -- Last month we saw the release of the NVIDIA 177.67 Linux driver along with the 177.67 beta driver, and a 177.70 driver. In the fourth NVIDIA Linux driver release in under a month's time, the 177.76 display driver has been released. This too looks like another beta driver with more fixes in store for those with GeForce or Quadro hardware owners.

September 18, 2008 -- Last month with the Catalyst 8.8 Linux driver we finally experienced CrossFire support on Linux as well as OverDrive support. This was one of the most significant driver releases of the year, but it's now time to move on as Catalyst 8.9 has just been released. This new driver update does bring a few exciting changes: the long-awaited WINE fixes, what appears to be RandR 1.2 with accelerated rotation support, and a horde of bug-fixes.

September 16, 2008 -- When the Radeon HD 4850 and Radeon HD 4870 were introduced earlier this year, it was wonderful. These latest high-end graphics cards from ATI had same-day Linux support through their Catalyst driver and the open-source ATI drivers had "just worked" with the RV770 series. The mode-setting support with the xf86-video-ati and xf86-video-radeonhd drivers just required adding in the PCI IDs for these new PCI Express graphics cards and then the rest of the magic was provided by AtomBIOS. However, with the introduction of the Radeon HD 4600 series, not everything is working instantly with the open-source drivers.

August 29, 2008 -- With Mesa 7.1 having been released this week and the open-source R600/770 3D support just around the corner, we've taken this opportunity to see how the open-source Mesa 3D stack compares to AMD's monthly-refined Catalyst Linux Suite with the fglrx driver performs for the Radeon X1000 (R500) series. In this article are Mesa 7.1 and Catalyst 8.8 benchmarks for the Radeon X1300PRO and X1800XL graphics cards.

August 21, 2008 -- Tuesday the NVIDIA 177.67 Display Driver was released and then yesterday the ATI Catalyst 8.8 Driver came out with OverDrive and CrossFire support. Today though we are back with another NVIDIA Linux driver release. Due to fallout from the 177.67 driver, NVIDIA has replaced it just two days later with the 177.68 Beta.