April 17, 2013 -- With the ever-changing state of Linux graphics drivers -- both for the open and closed-source drivers -- new tests have been conducted to compare the OpenGL graphics performance on Linux with AMD Radeon graphics. In this article are benchmarks of nine different Radeon HD graphics cards when being tested on the very latest AMD Catalyst (13.3 Beta 3) graphics driver as well as the open-source AMD Radeon driver consisting of Mesa 9.2-devel and the yet-to-be-released Linux 3.9 kernel.
April 16, 2013 -- While Intel only supports their classic Mesa DRI driver when it comes to their open-source 3D driver on Linux, developed independently is also a Gallium3D driver for Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge generations of Intel graphics processors. In this article are benchmarks of the new Intel (i965) Gallium3D driver with Ivy Bridge HD 4000 hardware.
April 14, 2013 -- The Gallium3D LLVMpipe driver that's commonly used as the fallback software rasterizer on Linux desktop systems when no GPU hardware driver is present, is a heck of a lot faster with the current Mesa development code. The gains are surprising and quite remarkable.
April 13, 2013 -- Following on from our earlier Nouveau Gallium3D benchmarks of Mesa 9.2-devel earlier this week, for our first benchmarks this Saturday we have tests of Intel HD 4000 "Ivy Bridge" graphics when running Mesa 9.2-devel and compared to the Git branches of Mesa 9.1 and 9.0. Overall, there's some more open-source Intel graphics performance improvements to look forward to with this next Mesa release.
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.