April 07, 2006 -- Four months since the launch of the 1.0-8178 Linux display drivers, NVIDIA is finally out of the starting gates with the official replacement. Among many other changes support for the new GeForce 7 series have been added to these 1.0-8756 drivers as well as a few peculiar changes for which we have been documenting over the past month with their internal 1.0-8751 candidate. Today at Phoronix, we have taken these new 1.0-8756 drivers for a performance spin.

March 26, 2006 -- When continuing our investigation for a recent article, it was found that Hewlett-Packard is hosting a NVIDIA Linux display driver that is numbered 1.0-8183. The interesting part about this is that the latest drivers available from NVIDIA's official site are 1.0-8178, which was released toward the end of last year. If you had read our other related articles, you will also know that we have been testing the 1.0-8751 Beta display drivers for most of this month now, and NVIDIA is not expected to release a new set until early April. What is inside the drivers that are entitled 8183 Revision 1? What are the details involved? We have a small report today on these findings, as well as a download.

March 25, 2006 -- Here at Phoronix we have been covering the Scalable Link Interface support under Linux since its launch with the inception of the 1.0-8174 display drivers back on December 5, 2005. While this NVIDIA SLI support can still be considered very much rudimentary compared against the Microsoft Windows support with the ForceWare drivers, which were introduced back on November 9 of 2004, there is no clear sight for how it will ultimately fair in the world of Linux. According to some information we have obtained from our sources and research, NVIDIA's motives for Linux SLI may largely dissent from the public opinion. In this article today, there are a few comments we would like to share about the big green manufacturer and their outlook on alternative operating systems.

March 14, 2006 -- Now that last week we presented the world with our findings for the NVIDIA GeForce 7900GT 256MB, we are back with our complete Linux gaming benchmarks. Although the 7900 supportive drivers are not yet in the hands of the public, we have obtained the Linux drivers from NVIDIA and are numbered 1.0-8751. Is the 7900 series plagued by the issues we had originally faced when dealing with the 7800GTX last year, and its clocking problems? We shall find out as we compare the 7900GT against some popular NVIDIA competitors.

March 13, 2006 -- Since the public launch of the NVIDIA GeForce 7900 series this past week (March 09, 2006) we have been assisting Roderick Colenbrander, or better known as NVClock's Thunderbird, in appending support for this card under this Linux NVIDIA utility. For those that have never used NVClock, it is a text-based and graphical (GTK or Qt) utility released under the GNU General Public License and was originally designed as the lone NVIDIA overclocking utility. Today we have been testing some new NVClock code and have additional information available in regards to the 7900GT and other information to assist developers.

March 08, 2006 -- Released from ATI today are the new Windows CATALYST v6.3 display drivers as well as the now monthly Linux fglrx display drivers. The new ATI Linux v8.23.7 display drivers continue to lack X1000 series support but there are a few improvements in this release when it comes to OpenGL, FSAA, and X800/850 compatibility improvements. Today at Phoronix, we have taken these drivers for yet another spin to display its gaming performance abilities on this exciting eve of CeBIT 2006.

February 22, 2006 -- Accelerated Indirect GL X, or more easily known as AIGLX, has been in the technology spotlight this week after Fedora had made its presence known on this Monday. AIGLX serves in the Fedora Rendering Project with a key focus of enabling OpenGL-accelerated effects onto a standard desktop. This software runs off a slightly modified X.Org server, with a couple extensions, Mesa update, and a version of Metacity with composite manager. According to Fedora representatives, AIGLX is not meant to compete with Novell's Xgl. Accelerated Indirect GL X is still very much in development stages and only compatible with a limited number of video cards running Fedora Core 5 Test 3. Today we fired up FC5T3 on an ATI Radeon 9200 and have a limited number of rudimentary screenshots of the present effects with window minimization and fades.

February 20, 2006 -- Ubuntu, Mark Shuttleworth's brainchild, has overcome another feat this morning with the advent of Ubuntu v6.04 (Dapper Drake) Flight 4. Dapper Drake Flight 4 is the fourth milestone release in a series of development builds with the release candidate coming out April of 2006. In addition to a host of new extras, the focus of our attention today is on its Xgl and Compiz capabilities. Xgl is the X server architecture layered on top of OpenGL while Compiz is the composting manager to the X.Org project. Both of these projects were largely contributed by Novell. With a few modifications, as well as configuration for the NVIDIA device, we had Xgl and Compiz running on the Ubuntu Dapper Drake Flight 4 LiveCD! The plug-ins utilized were cube, decoration, fade, minimize, move, place, resize, rotate, scale, switcher, wobbly, and zoom. Unfortunately, the Gconf Compiz abilities were not accessible from the Dapper Drake repositories during our testing time. At hand today are a wealth of images demonstrating the various graphical abilities, as well as a few looks at the newly introduced Ubuntu Espresso LiveCD installer. Keep in mind, the Compiz Wobbly shots are quite aliased, thus we are working on an animated preview by the time Xgl + Compiz is largely introduced to Linux.

February 09, 2006 -- Yet again, the red has its monthly ritual of pumping out new display driver for its Microsoft Windows and Linux users. The drivers this month are version 6.2 for CATALYST and 8.22.5 for Linux fglrx. On the Linux side of things, support for the 2.6.15 kernel has finally been appended as well as fixing up a few IDs and preventing some crashes. Meanwhile, Windows CATALYST is prominent with its various amendments. Striking the scene this morning is our usual array of ATI Linux gaming benchmarks.

February 04, 2006 -- When it comes to a multi-headed environment under Linux, there are two popular options for consumers -- Xinerama and TwinView. Although TwinView was developed by NVIDIA for allowing multiple monitors to be powered by a single GPU with their array of GeForce graphics cards, Xinerama was originally developed by Digital Equipment Corporation under the name of PanoramiX, and was later incorporated into the X Window System. Today at Phoronix, we have studied the frame-rate gaming performance under multi-headed NVIDIA TwinView and Xinerama configurations as well as a traditional single-head design.