April 04, 2013 -- Last year was the landmark announcement of an open-source NVIDIA Tegra graphics driver for Linux that was developed with the support of NVIDIA. In late November, NVIDIA published open-source 2D acceleration support for their newer ARM SoCs. Today, 3D support is being announced for the open-source NVIDIA Tegra graphics driver.

April 02, 2013 -- Within the next few hours AMD will be publishing open-source driver code that exposes their Unified Video Decoder (UVD) engine on modern Radeon HD graphics cards. This will finally allow open-source graphics drivers to take advantage of hardware-accelerated video decoding. Read more details in this Phoronix exclusive.

February 26, 2013 -- The last time I extensively tested the AMD Radeon Gallium3D LLVM shader compiler back-end was last April. Since then the R600 LLVM back-end has matured quite a lot with new features and was merged into upstream LLVM. In the past few days I carried out some new tests on several different graphics cards using Mesa Git master of the R600 Gallium3D open-source graphics driver.

February 25, 2013 -- For seeing how far the open-source ATI/AMD Linux graphics driver has advanced, in this article are benchmarks from a vintage Radeon X1800XT (R520) graphics card when it's tested on a Catalyst Linux graphics driver from five years ago. The Ubuntu Linux releases every year going back to 2010 were then tested for reference to see how the open-source graphics driver matured just in the past three years. Here are the results in this article from the extensive round of testing.

February 22, 2013 -- After recently carrying out legacy Radeon benchmarks comparing Mesa/Gallium3D versions from an ATI Radeon X1800XT (R520) graphics card, up today is a vintage Linux kernel DRM comparison. For seeing if modern Linux kernels are still influencing the performance of this vintage ATI Radeon graphics card, here are benchmarks comparing the modern Linux 3.1 to 3.8 releases.

February 19, 2013 -- While there have already been a number of Radeon Gallium3D benchmarks from Mesa 9.1 using the common R600 Gallium3D driver that supports the Radeon HD 2000 through Radeon HD 6000 series graphics cards, still in existence is the R300g driver. For those still left using a vintage Radeon 9500 (R300) through Radeon X1000 (R500) graphics cards -- basically any ATI GPU roughly between seven and eleven years old -- there's this legacy open-source graphics driver. R300g doesn't see nearly the amount of development activity that the more modern R600g driver sees, but there's still a fair amount of changes. In this article are benchmarks of Mesa 9.1-rc2 on an ATI Radeon X1800XT (R520) graphics card compared to the past four Mesa/Gallium3D stable releases.

February 12, 2013 -- In this article are benchmarks of the past two Ubuntu Long-Term Support releases (Ubuntu 12.04.1 LTS and Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS) compared to the latest Ubuntu 13.04 development state. Being looked at specifically for this round of testing is the AMD Radeon Linux graphics performance with the latest open-source driver compared to an older Catalyst driver. For an AMD Radeon HD 4800 series graphics card, the current state of the open-source graphics driver on Linux is beginning to outperform an old AMD Catalyst driver from 2010 for select Linux OpenGL games.

February 08, 2013 -- Last week I delivered benchmarks showing Mesa 9.1 delivers faster Intel OpenGL graphics. The benchmarks in that article were carried out on an Intel Core i7 "Ivy Bridge" system with HD 4000 graphics while since then there have been many requests to have similar tests done on a previous-generation Sandy Bridge system. As a result of those requests, here are benchmarks of an Intel Core i5 "Sandy Bridge" processor with Intel HD 3000 graphics as the Mesa 9.1 performance is compared to the earlier 9.0.2, 8.0.5, and 7.11.2 branches.

February 06, 2013 -- After last week delivering benchmarks that showed Intel graphics being faster with Mesa 9.1 relative to earlier Mesa 3D releases, up today are benchmarks of Radeon Gallium3D (R600g) to compare the Mesa 9.1 performance to Mesa 9.0.2, 8.0.5, and 7.11.2.

February 01, 2013 -- Last week benchmarks were delivered on Phoronix that showed the Intel DRM GPU driver performance between the Linux 3.2 and 3.8 kernels. In this article are similar benchmarks of the Radeon DRM driver in recent kernel releases using AMD graphics hardware but going back only to the Linux 3.4 kernel due to show-stopping issues.