October 28, 2007 -- In this edition of the Nouveau Companion, the developers of the open-source 2D/3D NVIDIA display driver talk about IRC color coding, NV04 performance improvements, texture fixes, EXA advancements, register combiners, and more. Also being worked on by the Nouveau camp has been a NV4x TTM and Gallium prototype. The Nouveau developers are still in need of some additional testing, so be sure to give them a hand if you're able to do so.

October 25, 2007 -- This past Sunday we started our first-ever Linux Graphics Survey that looked at the usage of X.Org display drivers, hardware, and the display features being sought after by Linux desktop users. In less than four days, we received over 10,000 survey submissions! This survey will be going on until November 21, so if you haven't yet participated you still have plenty of time to do so. But for those of you that have already taken the survey, what are the results so far? Well, below are the percentages from all of the responses collected before 10:00AM PST today. In Late November when the survey has ended, we will present the final results.

October 23, 2007 -- Today it's now time where the fglrx driver reaches yet another milestone. Not only does today's release address many of the outstanding bugs for the earlier GPU generations while also introducing a few new features, but it also delivers AIGLX support! Yes, you read that right. You can finally run your ATI graphics card with the fglrx driver and run Compiz, Beryl, or Compiz Fusion without using XGL! This is coming 13 months after NVIDIA had introduced its AIGLX support, but now just days after the release of Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon it's here for ATI hardware. Granted, if you were using an older ATI GPU with the open-source Radeon driver, you could have been benefiting from AIGLX already.

October 21, 2007 -- While Linux desktop surveys are nothing new, no recent polls have looked specifically at Linux graphics when it comes to X.Org video drivers, hardware, and related video features. We, however, at Phoronix see a need for this information to be profiled and have launched the first-annual Linux graphics survey. This survey is intended to allow the development community to get a better understanding of the video hardware in use, what open-source and closed-source drivers are being used, and other relevant information.

October 12, 2007 -- It's time for another issue of the Nouveau Companion, which talks about the development work done on the open-source 2D/3D NVIDIA driver over the past two weeks. Among the topics talked about in this issue include PlayStation 3 graphics via Nouveau, using TTM memory manager, and the Gallium3D architecture. A stable 2D Nouveau driver is about completed with EXA support but currently lacks an EXA implementation on the older NVIDIA hardware and there are still problems with NVIDIA's GeForce 8 hardware.

September 29, 2007 -- It's going on two weeks since the RadeonHD driver was made available, which is AMD's sanctioned open-source driver for the Radeon X1000 (R500) and Radeon HD 2000 (R600) series (as well as future generations of AMD GPUs). In this time, we have seen some great progress made with this open-source driver and have a few additional remarks to share about its status and the first bits of this driver's roadmap.

September 26, 2007 -- It's been about a month since the last Nouveau Companion, the development newsletter talking about the work going into the open-source 3D NVIDIA display driver, but today the latest edition is now available. Covered in the 27th edition of the Nouveau Companion are details on the progress made in the past month such as with porting the driver to using libpciaccess, bug squashing, 2D acceleration working for NVIDIA's GeForce 8800GTX, X-Video fixes, and RandR 1.2 support was merged back into the Nouveau master branch. The Nouveau developers have received a few new graphics card donations but are still in need of development help and testing.

September 23, 2007 -- This past week was marked by the release of the NVIDIA 100.14.19 display driver for Linux and Solaris, which was the first alternative OS driver release from this Santa Clara company in about three months. The public change-log is quite lengthy and finally delivered on fixing the GeForce 8 performance regression. In our GeForce 8800GTS Linux tests, the performance fix was very evident. However, now that we have had the time to run more extensive tests with the GeForce 8 series and this new driver, we have found not everything to be smooth sailing.

September 18, 2007 -- After a very slow summer, NVIDIA has finally rolled out an updated Linux proprietary display driver. The release highlights are quite extensive. However, as NVIDIA did not have the courtesy to allow for testing this driver in advance and right now we are out covering Intel's IDF, we do not have benchmarks to share. However, as time permits over the next day or two we hope to publish some new Linux NVIDIA GeForce 8800 benchmarks.

September 17, 2007 -- While today's unveiling of the RadeonHD driver for the ATI R500 and R600 series is great news, this driver right now is targeted solely for developers as it's still experimental and doesn't yet support 3D acceleration and other key functionality generally needed in production environments. However, if you are looking to try out this new RadeonHD driver on Ubuntu because you're running into problems with the proprietary fglrx driver or just wishing to report your results, we've documented the installation procedures for Ubuntu.