July 21, 2011 -- Being merged into the mainline Mesa tree once Mesa 7.11 has been released is the GLSL-To-TGSI translator. This allows core Mesa to translate directly from GLSL IR to TGSI, rather than stepping through the crufty Mesa IR, before reaching the Gallium3D hardware drivers. It's more efficient this way -- leading to possible performance improvements -- and it's also a stepping-stone in bringing GL Shading Language 1.30 support, which is required for OpenGL 3.0 compatibility.

July 14, 2011 -- Open-source code supporting the AMD Radeon HD 6000 "Northern Islands" GPU hardware has been available since January, but only in the past few days has this Linux code matured to the point of being stable and useful for testing. In this article are our first benchmarks of the AMD Northern Islands and Cayman graphics processors using the open-source Mesa Gallium3D driver and comparing its performance to AMD's proprietary Catalyst driver.

July 13, 2011 -- The new benchmarks going out today on Phoronix are looking at the performance of Intel's Sandy Bridge graphics with the latest Microsoft Windows 7 and Ubuntu Linux drivers. Not only are we using the very latest drivers, but there is also a separate Linux test run with SNA, the "Sandy Bridge New Acceleration" architecture enabled.

July 07, 2011 -- As noted last week on Phoronix, Google has Chromium OS engineers making improvements to Intel's Gallium3D driver even though this open-source Linux driver isn't officially supported by Intel Corp. Google's interested in shipping the Intel Gallium3D driver on their Chromium OS netbooks in order to take advantage of the Low-Level Virtual Machine (LLVM) and other Gallium3D features to make up for the netbook's lack of vertex shader hardware. How does this community-maintained Intel 3D driver now compare performance-wise to Intel's official classic Mesa driver? Here is a fresh set of benchmarks from the latest Mesa Git code over the US holiday weekend.

July 06, 2011 -- Following last week's completion of the Radeon driver power management tests against the AMD Catalyst driver, now it is time to turn the tables on NVIDIA. In this article are some power consumption and thermal tests when comparing the latest open-source "Nouveau" driver code against NVIDIA's closed-source proprietary driver.

June 28, 2011 -- Today on Phoronix are not only new benchmarks of the proprietary Catalyst graphics driver compared to the open-source Radeon Linux driver alternative when looking at the OpenGL frame-rates, but also metrics on a number of other fronts. In this article is a graphics driver comparison when looking at the system power consumption, GPU operating temperature, and CPU usage too. The results are quite interesting and not commonly looked at on Phoronix or by users.

June 25, 2011 -- The first of the AMD Radeon HD 6000 "Northern Islands" graphics cards launched late last year, and while the open-source Linux driver support is technically there for those interested in this alternative to the proprietary Catalyst driver, the support is still largely broken. Here is a quick look.

June 16, 2011 -- Last week we provided a fresh look at the AMD Radeon Gallium3D performance using the latest development code for the Linux 3.0 kernel and Mesa 7.11 library. Today we are now looking at the Gallium3D driver performance of the Nouveau driver that is reverse-engineered to support NVIDIA GeForce graphics processors.

June 10, 2011 -- As noted earlier in the week, the open-source AMD Radeon "R600g" driver that supports 3D acceleration on Radeon HD 2000 series graphics cards through the latest Radeon HD 6000 and Fusion graphics processors, is becoming quite fit. The driver is nearing a point of stability, is mature enough for most desktop users, and it is beginning to receive some performance optimizations and other improvements. Thanks to this recent work, plus the ongoing development of the Linux 3.0 kernel, here is a fresh set of AMD Gallium3D Linux driver benchmarks.

May 27, 2011 -- It has been about a month since we last delivered ATI/AMD Radeon Linux benchmarks comparing the performance of the open-source driver against the high-performance proprietary driver. Since that point there's been various improvements to the Mesa/Gallium3D driver and there's also been the merge of the latest Radeon DRM code for the next kernel, which will likely be called the Linux 3.0 kernel, but in the DRM pull request was referred to as Gardenshed. Here are these benchmarks on several different Radeon graphics cards.