March 25, 2010 -- With Mesa 7.8 arriving this month, we took the time to benchmark a few recent releases of the Mesa 3D stack with the Radeon DRI driver to see how the OpenGL performance has changed -- if at all -- over the past few months. In this article are our R500 Mesa benchmarks from the Mesa 7.6, 7.7, 7.8-rc1, and 7.9-devel releases.

March 23, 2010 -- Earlier this month AMD rolled out a new workstation graphics card driver, which is effectively the same Catalyst driver used by the consumer-oriented Radeon graphics cards but with greater testing and certification for the ATI workstation offerings. The press release announcing this new driver was titled "Application Performance Increases By Up To 20 Percent with Latest ATI FirePro Graphics Driver," so we decided to see if this proprietary driver really lives up to its claims under Linux.

March 22, 2010 -- Gallium3D, the graphics driver architecture started by Tungsten Graphics to overhaul the hardware driver support in Mesa, has been around for a few years but it is finally getting close to appearing on more desktop systems. Now that the Nouveau DRM code is in the mainline Linux kernel and its main 3D driver is Gallium3D-based, we will hopefully be seeing that adopted by more distributions soon -- it's already being flipped on with Fedora 13. On the ATI side the "r300g" Gallium3D driver that provides Gallium3D support for the R300-R500 (up through the Radeon X1000 series) is also being battered into surprisingly good shape. To see where the Radeon Gallium3D support is at for these older ATI graphics cards we have run a set of tests comparing the OpenGL performance under the latest Mesa 7.9-devel code with the Gallium3D driver to running the classic Mesa DRI driver.

March 18, 2010 -- Earlier this week we published comparative benchmarks of Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, Ubuntu, and openSUSE. In the discussion that followed, a number of people requested a set of tests that compare the performance of the ATI Radeon Linux graphics driver stack with kernel mode-setting (KMS) vs. user-space mode-setting (UMS), so today we have such results to deliver.

February 17, 2010 -- As we shared a few days ago, Fedora 13 will provide OpenGL acceleration support for NVIDIA graphics cards via the Nouveau driver when installing the Mesa DRI experimental drivers package. There is finally 3D acceleration for NVIDIA graphics cards using an open-source driver on Linux without having to depend upon NVIDIA's official binary driver. What makes this open-source 3D support for NVIDIA GPUs even more interesting is that it is atop the Gallium3D driver architecture rather than classic Mesa. With that said, we are providing early benchmarks of the Nouveau Gallium3D driver in Fedora 13 with two GeForce graphics cards as we compare the performance to NVIDIA's official Linux driver.

February 09, 2010 -- As we alluded to last week, we have been in the process of benchmarking many Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 series graphics cards using the open-source ATI Linux graphics stack with the Mesa R600/700 DRI driver. We have now carried out our first batch of R600/700 3D tests using this constantly evolving open-source driver to provide OpenGL acceleration and here are the results.

February 07, 2010 -- Yesterday Luc Verhaegen gave a talk at FOSDEM on reverse engineering a motherboard BIOS, but today we finally have X@FOSDEM for the last time. Luc has just begun his talk on unifying and simplifying the free software desktop's graphics driver stack. Here are his slides and we will be back with more updates and videos on Phoronix as the presentation progresses.

January 06, 2010 -- We know that NVIDIA's Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU) works very well for exposing PureVideo capabilities on Linux. We have benchmarked VDPAU and found it to perform very well in that under Linux it's possible to play HD videos with a $20 CPU and $30 GPU thanks to this video acceleration method. VDPAU is the best video acceleration / decoding API on Linux and is widely adopted by various multimedia applications, which is all in contrast to AMD's XvBA and their troubled implementation. But how does VDPAU work on mobile devices? With the ASUS Eee PC 1201N that is built on NVIDIA's ION platform we ran a new set of VDPAU video playback tests.

December 28, 2009 -- Compared to past years when recapping the AMD/ATI Linux advancements over the past calendar year, 2009 was not quite as exciting, which can be viewed as both good and bad for their Catalyst Linux driver. There were many advancements this year on AMD's open-source side, but in 2009 there wasn't as many milestones for their Catalyst driver like in the past with the introduction of CrossFire, OverDrive, same-day Linux support, the AMD Catalyst Control Center, and other new features. Here is our 2009 year in review look at AMD's advancements to their proprietary Catalyst Linux driver along with our annual benchmarks.

December 22, 2009 -- Nearly two years ago at the Linux Foundation Summit in Austin was VIA's most recent announcement about becoming serious with open-source support. This was not VIA's first time they claimed to back an open-source strategy, which led a number of open-source developers to immediately call VIA's open-source strategy a bluff. To date this still is mostly a bluff, but they have produced some fluff. In 2010 it looks like this will still be the case, but VIA hopes to produce some code by the second half of 2010. This code, however, will likely not appear in most Linux distributions until 2011.