Display Drivers

Mesa 9.1 Delivers Faster Intel OpenGL Graphics

January 30, 2013 -- With Mesa 9.1 nearing its release next month and having been branched from master as of this week, here are some new benchmarks looking at the Intel HD 4000 "Ivy Bridge" graphics performance when testing Mesa 9.1-devel Git to Mesa 9.0.2, 8.0.5, and 7.11.2. Overall, Mesa 9.1 delivers an OpenGL performance boost for the latest-generation Intel hardware.

Linux 3.2 To 3.8 Kernels With Intel Ivy Bridge Graphics

January 27, 2013 -- With the Intel Haswell product launch coming up soon, here's a look at how the Intel "Ivy Bridge" HD 4000 graphics support has matured on the seven most recent Linux kernel releases. This benchmarking shows how the performance of the Intel DRM driver has changed between the Linux 3.2 kernel and the Linux 3.8 kernel that's presently under development when using the integrated graphics found on the latest-generation Core i7 CPU.

Mesa Update Makes Radeon MSAA Much Faster

January 21, 2013 -- Earlier this month I ran some new benchmarks of the Radeon Gallium3D MSAA support that was merged into the R300g driver. Unfortunately, the performance was very disappointing, but last week there were luckily some anti-aliasing performance optimizations that were merged into Mesa. I have now done new benchmarks of the new Mesa R300g driver with these multi-sample anti-aliasing performance optimizations, which show quite a noticeable difference from the open-source driver compared to earlier this month.

ION: Nouveau Competes With The NVIDIA R310 Driver

January 18, 2013 -- It's been quite a while since delivering any Linux graphics benchmarks of the NVIDIA ION, the platform for pairing integrated NVIDIA graphics with an Intel Atom processor for small form factor PCs. While NVIDIA's ION is basically defunct, for those still having a nettop or netbook that's ION-based, here's a performance comparison of the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics between the open-source Nouveau driver and the NVIDIA 310.xx binary Linux graphics driver.

Radeon R300g Morphological Anti-Aliasing Performance

January 15, 2013 -- Last week benchmarks were delivered of the AMD Radeon R300g with MSAA, after the much-used feature was finally implemented in a proper and working state for this open-source graphics driver. Coming out today are new Morphological Anti-Aliasing (MLAA) benchmarks from this Gallium3D driver to compare to the Multi-Sample Anti-Aliasing results.

Five-Way NVIDIA GeForce Comparison On Nouveau

January 11, 2013 -- With the GeForce 600 "Kepler" graphics cards now working on Nouveau in an out-of-the-box manner with OpenGL acceleration, here's a brief five-way NVIDIA GeForce graphics card comparison when using the Nouveau open-source driver with the Linux 3.8 kernel and Mesa 9.1-devel.

Radeon Gallium3D MSAA Performance (R300g)

January 10, 2013 -- This week support for MSAA was finally added to the R300g driver so that the Radeon X1000 graphics cards and earlier can finally take advantage of anti-aliasing with this open-source Gallium3D driver. In this article are some benchmarks of the MSAA performance with a Radeon X1800XT, but even with this higher-end GPU when it comes to the R300g support coverage, the anti-aliasing performance isn't really usable.

NVIDIA GeForce 600 "Kepler" On Open-Source: It's Uselessly Slow

January 08, 2013 -- With the Linux 3.8 kernel that's presently under development, the open-source reverse-engineered Nouveau driver for supporting NVIDIA graphics processors has seen some significant changes. One of the late changes was enabling Kepler acceleration support. While there is now an "out of the box" open-source GPU driver that supports the GeForce 600 GPUs with 3D/OpenGL acceleration, it's incredibly slow.

Nouveau Driver Remains Much Slower Than NVIDIA's Official Driver

January 04, 2013 -- While benchmarks this week have shown the Nouveau driver can be faster with the Linux 3.8 kernel, further benchmarks have shown that this reverse-engineered open-source driver for supporting the spectrum of NVIDIA GPUs is still at a significant loss compared to NVIDIA's official but proprietary Linux graphics driver.

Nouveau NVIDIA Driver Can Be Faster With Linux 3.8

January 02, 2013 -- Published already on Phoronix have been benchmarks of the in-development Linux 3.8 kernel when it comes to measuring the DRM graphics driver performance improvements for AMD Radeon hardware. In this article is a look at the Nouveau driver performance, the reverse-engineered open-source NVIDIA graphics driver. There's a fair amount of changes to look forward to in the next Linux kernel release for Nouveau and it's yielding some performance improvements.
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