June 19, 2007 -- Last week the first open-source ATI R500 (Radeon X1000 series) driver had entered the world. This new driver (named the xf86-video-avivo) is very early into development, but a small set of developers have been working on reverse engineering this GPU class for the past couple of months. This driver does not yet contain any 3D functionality or support for features that most end-users expect. At this point, the driver just contains very basic initialization and set video mode support for a portion of the Radeon X1000 family. Even with this very basic R500 driver, we couldn't help but to explore the Avivo driver for the past few days.

June 08, 2007 -- We have previously looked at the NVIDIA 100.14.03 and 100.14.06 display drivers, but this afternoon we finally have our hands on the stable NVIDIA 100.14.09 driver. New in version 100.14.09 is added GeForce 8 and Quadro product support, improved notebook GPU support, improved RenderAccel support for sub-pixel anti-aliased fonts, added Xv brightness and contrast controls, improved interaction with newer kernels, and fixing an issue with nvidia-settings. The new yet-to-be-released GeForce 8 names have also tipped up in the release notes. We've seen many of these features introduced in the previous 100.14.xx builds, but they are now officially supported.

June 08, 2007 -- Last week we had published The Truth About ATI/AMD & Linux, and to no real surprise, the feedback ranged from beliefs that it was propaganda to others being grateful that AMD finally shared some additional information with their Linux customers about the fglrx development cycle. While the article was far from being propaganda, what had outraged a number of open-source developers were AMD's comments on the R200 support or there the lack of. In this article, we have a few additional comments to share along with what some open-source developers had to say about AMD's information.

June 01, 2007 -- Last year when AMD announced their acquisition of ATI it led many to wonder how this would impact the quality of their Linux support and driver. Some had even speculated that AMD would be opening the code to at least a subset of their graphics drivers, and while this issue has come up again more recently, we will cover this particular topic in a different article. In this article we will be exposing what truly consists of the ATI/AMD driver development cycle and ultimately what they are really doing to improve their image in the Linux community. We have been granted unprecedented access to share with you their once unknown driver development model.

May 31, 2007 -- It was a year ago that AMD/ATI had delivered the fglrx 8.25.18 display driver, which corrected a bug causing issues with the Radeon X1000 512MB video cards, added new product support, and squashed a variety of other bugs. Well, today AMD delivered the 8.37.6 Linux display driver. Affecting this driver the most is support for X server version 1.3 and appended several other fixes along with a slight upgrade to the AMD Catalyst Control Center Linux Edition. While no AIGLX support was added or no new features introduced, the upgrade should be worth the time.

May 28, 2007 -- Yesterday we covered the graphics hardware needed to handle Beryl and on the heels of that article we are taking a quick look at another Linux versus Windows comparison for the official ATI/AMD graphics drivers. NVIDIA's Linux and Windows drivers perform about the same and in some instances the Linux binary driver even running faster, but as we have been sharing now for many months the Linux fglrx driver is handicapped for performance. Has things since improved for ATI? Well, as you'll see in this article by using the official Linux driver from ATI/AMD you can expect your frame-rate to be cut in half compared to the most recent version of the Windows Catalyst driver.

May 21, 2007 -- It was exactly one month ago that NVIDIA had delivered the 100.14.03 display driver and today we are reporting on yet another new beta driver in the 100.14.xx series. This time around we have our hands on the NVIDIA 100.14.06 graphics driver, which offers improved notebook support and fixes a variety of minor bugs.

May 18, 2007 -- The last time we had looked at the performance of Intel's integrated graphics under Linux with their open-source driver was back in February when testing the GMA 3000 IGP using an Intel DQ965GFEKR motherboard. However, with display drivers constantly improving, we recently carried out some additional Intel Q965 graphics tests along with comparing these numbers to discrete graphics solutions from AMD/ATI and NVIDIA.

May 15, 2007 -- XGI Technology is still in business, but what has happened to them? We once saw hope in them for providing discrete graphics processors to take on the NVIDIA and ATI duopoly, but they have since discontinued their Volari 8 series. While they're no longer producing these desktop chips, they remain an active player in the server and embedded graphics industry -- accompanied by their open-source driver.

May 05, 2007 -- Since late last year the open-source Linux community has been ecstatic about the growing progress made by the Nouveau developers. Nouveau is an X.Org and FreeDesktop.org project for developing an open-source 2D/3D display driver for NVIDIA graphics cards. With NVIDIA Corporation not providing hardware specifications, this driver is being written through reverse-engineering NVIDIA's binary display driver. While the developers of Nouveau are making great strides and this driver is taking shape, the open-source ATI driver must not be forgotten.