January 26, 2011 -- AMD put out a rare beta Linux driver this Monday and they have now just announced the release of the Catalyst 11.1 driver as their stable monthly update for Linux and Windows users. With this Catalyst driver, there is though one interesting but hidden feature that is sure to please many ATI/AMD Radeon Linux desktop users.

January 21, 2011 -- Earlier this month I reported on good and bad news for the Nouveau Gallium3D driver with the good news being that for the hardware that played well with this reverse-engineered open-source driver, the OpenGL performance was not too bad in most instances compared to NVIDIA's official proprietary driver. There still is quite a difference in performance between the two NVIDIA Linux drivers, but it is a usable experience in a number of cases and is not too bad for Nouveau being a community-driven driver. However, the bad news was that non-GeForce 8 hardware had regressed to being non-functioning. Since that article, however, using code that is some more recent I have the GeForce 9 and GeForce 200 acceleration working again. The current code though leaves a lot to be desired.

January 19, 2011 -- A week ago I reported on the open-source ATI driver becoming a lot faster thanks to the KMS page-flipping support finally landing in the mainline Linux kernel and xf86-video-ati driver, tiling improvements, and lots of work going into the R300g/R600g Gallium3D drivers. The open-source ATI Gallium3D is not conclusively faster than the proprietary Catalyst driver is, but it's becoming a much more competitive race. In last week's article an ATI Mobility Radeon GPU was used to illustrate these improvements, but in this follow-up article are the Linux benchmark results for three discrete Radeon graphics cards using the stock Ubuntu 10.10 open-source ATI driver, the last R500-supported Catalyst Linux driver, and then the latest open-source driver bits from the Linux 2.6.38 kernel.

January 17, 2011 -- For the past year or so we have been fascinated by the LLVMpipe driver on Mesa's Gallium3D driver architecture for accelerating OpenGL on your CPU (or any other Gallium3D state tracker) as a means of a more efficient and viable software rasterizer for Linux. Mesa's long-standing software rasterizer (swrast) driver is slow and next to useless while LLVMpipe is many times faster thanks to leveraging the Low-Level Virtual Machine and other optimizations atop Gallium3D. However, in order to run a basic OpenGL game purely on the CPU you still need a powerful CPU, but we are pleased to find there are some noticeable performance improvements to be found in Mesa 7.10.

January 14, 2011 -- In testing of OpenBenchmarking.org and preparations for the release of Phoronix Test Suite 3.0-Iveland at the end of February from SCALE, a lot of benchmarks have been happening to test the various analytical features and other new capabilities of this open benchmarking platform. In fact, it is really an overwhelming amount of benchmarks; the power capacity in my office is maxed out as benchmark after benchmark and system after system there is all sorts of test scenarios being looked upon. The benchmarks coming out on Phoronix.com over the past two months have just been barely scratching the surface of what has been going into the OpenBenchmarking.org system. Recently a lot of OpenCL compute benchmarks were pumped in, and since we have only published a few OpenCL Linux benchmarks -- OpenCL on Linux vs. Mac OS X and OpenCL NVIDIA vs. ATI on Linux -- here's some more in this article.

January 13, 2011 -- Now that the kernel mode-setting page-flipping for the ATI Radeon DRM kernel module has been merged into the Linux 2.6.38 kernel and the respective bits have been set in the xf86-video-ati DDX, we're in the process of running new open-source ATI graphics benchmarks under Linux. Our initial results (included in this article) show these latest improvements to cause some major performance boosts for the open-source ATI driver as it nears the level of performance of the proprietary Catalyst driver.

January 10, 2011 -- With our big AMD Linux GPU / driver comparison we found its open-source Gallium3D driver to be noticeably faster than the classic Mesa DRI driver across an array of Radeon hardware from multiple generations. However, the official Catalyst driver was multiple times faster (roughly 5.18x faster) than the Gallium3D driver, not to mention its lack of proper support for OpenGL 3/4, VA-API/VDPAU/XvBA video playback, and many other features only found within the proprietary Catalyst driver. Now though it is time to see how the Gallium3D Nouveau performance compares to that of NVIDIA's proprietary Linux driver across different GeForce graphics cards.

January 05, 2011 -- As was alluded to in our New Year greeting, we have been working on a massive graphics card / driver comparison under Linux. Beginning with ATI/AMD hardware, we have tested a series of graphics cards spanning the Radeon X1000, HD 2000, HD 3000, HD 4000, and HD 5000 generations using the very latest drivers. These drivers include the official Catalyst 10.12 Linux release as well as the very latest development code for the open-source Mesa and Gallium3D drivers. The results for seven ATI GPUs spanning four generations with three drivers are quite interesting.

December 30, 2010 -- Earlier this week we published our annual look at AMD's Catalyst driver releases from the past year. Not only did the Catalyst Linux driver this year picked up a couple new features, its driver performance had improved slightly over the past twelve months. In building up some initial test data for OpenBenchmarking.org we decided not only to do these tests on the latest consumer-grade graphics card this year, but expand it to cover the workstation performance too and to go back nearly two years in time. These results for an AMD FirePro V8700 graphics card with the monthly driver updates going back to Catalyst 9.2 are quite interesting. AMD announced twice this year optimizations to their FirePro driver software, but in reality these "optimizations" were largely unsustainable and not optimizations as much as they were attempting to address driver regressions from the past.

December 27, 2010 -- Earlier this month we delivered our annual performance look at NVIDIA's 2010 Linux graphics drivers and now the tables have turned to do our annual examination of the ATI/AMD Catalyst graphics drivers for the Radeon graphics processors. This was certainly an interesting year -- both good and bad -- for AMD with their Catalyst Linux driver.