April 13, 2012 -- Nouveau, the reverse-engineered open-source graphics driver for NVIDIA's entire range of graphics processors, is reaching a stable state where it's exiting the "staging" area of the Linux 3.4 kernel and being considered part of the standard, stable kernel configuration. How though is the Nouveau driver working out compared to NVIDIA's official, closed-source Linux graphics driver? Here are some new benchmarks from ten different graphics cards and other information on the state of Nouveau.

March 23, 2012 -- Following recent advancements in the open-source Radeon Linux driver like 2D color tiling support, I've carried out some new benchmarks of the open-source Radeon Gallium3D driver compared to AMD's official Catalyst driver. This time around, the open-source driver is seeing tests against AMD's binary blob when various performance-optimizing tweaks are enabled to see where the performance stands today.

March 21, 2012 -- In continuation of the Using The New Radeon Gallium3D 2D Color Tiling article from January, here's updated benchmarks of the latest Radeon Linux driver code with this performance-boosting feature enabled.

March 19, 2012 -- Recently I showed off some Intel DRM benchmarks from the Linux 3.3 kernel along with what will be in the Linux 3.4 kernel via drm-next. These results indicated some performance improvements on the side of Intel Sandy Bridge hardware, but how do the new kernel and Linux 3.4 impact the discrete Radeon graphics? Here's some benchmarks covering that side of the graphics table.

March 14, 2012 -- With the release of the Linux 3.3 kernel being imminent and the Linux 3.4 kernel drm-next already offering lots of changes, here are some Intel Sandy Bridge benchmarks comparing the Linux 3.2 kernel to a near-final Linux 3.3 kernel and then the drm-next kernel that's largely a 3.3 kernel but with the DRM driver code that will work its way into Linux 3.4.

March 09, 2012 -- After first being introduced on Windows years ago, and then FreeBSD and ReactOS support added last year, this week finally marked the release of TitaniumGL for Linux. TitaniumGL is self-described as a "freeware driver architecture" and carries a goal to support OpenGL on graphics cards with broken, bad, or missing OpenGL hardware drivers. Here are some benchmarks of TitaniumGL compared to NVIDIA's binary GPU driver and the Mesa/Gallium3D LLVMpipe software rasterizer.

February 24, 2012 -- Earlier this week I shared a pleasant surprise in Mesa 8.1 Radeon Gallium3D with some significant performance improvements to be found in the current Mesa Git code-base for the "R600g" driver in some OpenGL games. In this article is a more diverse look at the current state of Mesa 8.1 development for R600 Gallium3D and comparative benchmarks from every major release going back to Mesa 7.10.

February 20, 2012 -- Recently there has been a lot of talk about Hierarchical-Z/HyperZ support for R600g since its set to provide a measurable performance benefit the open-source Radeon driver for modern GPUs. This support has still not been mainlined and there are still a few issues to work out, but at least the support is stable for the older "R300g" driver and has been around for quite a while at this point. For those wondering what to expect from HiZ/HyperZ performance boosts, here is a preview.

February 15, 2012 -- Besides video decoding, re-clocking / performance improvements, OpenCL, and other areas, the Nouveau driver still has room to advance when it comes to 2D performance.

February 14, 2012 -- One of the less talked about features of Mesa 8.0 is its ability to handle MLAA, which is short for Morphological Anti-Aliasing. But how does MLAA on the open-source graphics drivers affect the OpenGL performance and is it worth it for boosting the image quality through this anti-aliasing technique? In this article are some benchmarks of MLAA under Mesa 8.0.