December 20, 2007 -- It's that time of the month again where we get to share with you all of the details on the latest ATI/AMD Linux driver release. This month, the ATI Catalyst 7.12 Linux driver (formally, what is known as fglrx 8.44) brings a host of new changes, mostly in the form of bug fixes. In total, there are just under a dozen noteworthy bug fixes in this release -- including addressing 3D acceleration issues on AGP graphics cards and the well-known OpenGL memory leak that was introduced with the new driver code-base. In addition, the FireGL graphics cards are now supported on this new driver code-base.

December 20, 2007 -- Just in time for the holidays, NVIDIA has released a new Linux display driver, which is a stable version of their previous 169.04 beta last month. In addition, the new NVIDIA 169.07 Linux driver has a few changes, while most of the release highlights were already found in the 169.04 release. We are preparing additional Linux tests with this new driver, but for right now we have the details on this proprietary display driver.

December 13, 2007 -- One of the special abilities of ATI's R600 GPU family is the integrated 5.1 surround sound audio support through HDMI. Many Radeon HD 2000 and HD 3800 series graphics cards also ship with a DVI to HDMI dongle, so that one can experience the full video playback capabilities of these discrete graphics cards. But what level of HDMI support can Linux users expect when using these latest ATI graphics cards? We have done some testing internally and have the initial ATI Linux HDMI video and audio results to report in this article.

December 06, 2007 -- Earlier this week we published benchmarks of the XRender extension using NVIDIA's latest beta Linux driver, which had a substantial performance boost thanks to Render improvements with this latest driver. One of the questions that have since come up is how ATI/AMD's binary Linux driver compares when using this X extension. Well, right now, it lags behind NVIDIA, but a Phoronix Forums member has discovered a hidden ATI Linux option that should yield XRender performance gains.

December 03, 2007 -- Towards the middle of last month, NVIDIA had released the 169.04 Beta Linux Driver. The change-log was quite lengthy and what we had discovered while benchmarking the GeForce 8 series was that there were improvements to be found in this release and it was far more than a simple version bump. One of the reported changes for this driver release was "improved RENDER performance", and out of requests from readers and interest by the Linux desktop community at large, we have conducted XRender benchmarks using render_bench and have the NVIDIA results available today.

November 29, 2007 -- It was just a week ago that the RadeonHD v0.0.4 driver was released, but today it has been replaced by v1.0! RadeonHD 1.0.0 was just pushed out to the public, and while it's still lacking 3D support and isn't bug-free, it's matured quite a bit over the past two and a half months that it's been available to the public.

November 23, 2007 -- Last week NVIDIA introduced the 169.04 Beta Linux driver for their GeForce and Quadro graphics cards. This X.Org driver contained a number of GeForce 8 fixes, initial support for the GeForce 8800GT graphics card, monitoring of PowerMizer state information, and other changes. What we had not tested, however, at that time was a performance comparison of the new driver and the previous 100.14.23 driver. The undocumented fact we have found is that this 169.04 Beta driver does deliver performance improvements for the GeForce 8 series on Linux.

November 22, 2007 -- For the past month we had been running the 2007 Linux Graphics Survey at Phoronix where we polled users to find out what display hardware they use, what their driver choice(s) are, and their other preferences as it pertains to Linux desktop users on the visual front. We received over 20,000 submissions from this survey and have the results to share with you on this Thanksgiving here in the United States.

November 22, 2007 -- In this Thanksgiving Day issue of the Nouveau Companion, the Nouveau team goes over what's left to do for a 2D stable driver release, the current work being done on the driver, and an assortment of Gallium3D and RandR 1.2 work. The stable 2D Nouveau driver wasn't announced in this issue, but it's coming soon.

November 21, 2007 -- For the past two months, the AMD release train has been running full speed ahead as they introduced their new driver code-base and last month had dropped in the AIGLX support. However, this month the AMD train has taken an intermediate stop as this closed-source driver embarks on its next journey. As always, we have all of the details for you on this month's ATI Catalyst 7.11 Linux display driver release.