August 03, 2012 -- A few days back I published benchmarks showing Intel's Ivy Bridge hardware regressing with Mesa 8.1. While those problems are still outstanding, the good news is that Intel's previous-generation Sandy Bridge hardware appears unaffected. Overall, Sandy Bridge is performing well with the soon-to-be-released Mesa 8.1 library for open-source Linux graphics drivers.

July 30, 2012 -- In recent days there have been updated Mesa 8.1 development benchmarks put out looking at the R600 Gallium3D, R300 Gallium3D, and Nouveau Gallium3D open-source drivers. Those results for the different drivers show that Mesa 8.1 is generally faster than the current Mesa 8.0 stable series, but that does not appear to be the case for Intel at the moment. It looks like there are some active regressions that are lowering the Intel Ivy Bridge graphics performance with their Mesa 8.1-devel driver.

July 28, 2012 -- Due to the extreme pace at which Chris Wilson has been releasing SNA architecture updates for Intel's open-source X.Org driver, here are another set of benchmarks of Intel Sandy Bridge HD 3000 graphics when comparing UXA and SNA using yesterday's Git code following the xf86-video-intel 2.20.2 driver release.

July 27, 2012 -- After delivering Mesa 8.0 vs. 8.1-devel benchmarks for the R600 Gallium3D driver that supports ATI/AMD Radeon hardware from the HD 2000 through HD 6000 series (along with similar Nouveau Gallium3D benchmarks), here is a look at the upcoming Mesa release when using the R300 Gallium3D driver with ATI Radeon X1000 series graphics cards.

July 25, 2012 -- Here are some recent benchmarks comparing Intel's SNA and UXA 2D acceleration architectures offered by their open-source Intel Linux graphics driver.

July 25, 2012 -- After last week sharing results for AMD Radeon R600g Gallium3D on Mesa 8.0 and 8.1-devel, here are benchmarks for several NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards comparing the OpenGL Gallium3D performance with Nouveau on Mesa 8.0 stable and Mesa 8.1-devel.

July 18, 2012 -- With Mesa 8.1 set to be released next month, here are some benchmarks comparing the Git performance of Mesa 8.0.4 to Mesa 8.1-devel for several generations of Radeon graphics cards. In this article the R600g Gallium3D driver is being put under the microscope while other articles in the coming days will look at the Intel i965 DRI driver, ATI R300g Gallium3D for the older Radeon GPUs, and the Nouveau Gallium3D driver.

July 17, 2012 -- After publishing last week a look at AMD's Catalyst Evolution For The Radeon HD 7000 Series, here's a similar set of benchmarks to see how the NVIDIA graphics driver performance has changed for the GeForce GTX 680 "Kepler" graphics card since its inception.

July 09, 2012 -- It used to be -- at least when using the Windows Catalyst drivers -- that within the first few months of AMD releasing new Radeon graphics hardware that Catalyst driver optimizations would deliver measurable improvements in this short span. For the Radeon HD 7000 series, which is built upon an entirely new GCN architecture, is this still the case? Here are benchmarks of all the AMD Catalyst Linux drivers that have been released this year and then benchmarked on an AMD Radeon HD 7950 graphics card.

July 06, 2012 -- Following the work by Google at the end of June to implement sRGB textures in the Intel i915 Gallium3D driver, new Phoronix benchmarks were conducted to see how the Intel Gallium3D driver now compares performance-wise to the classic i915 driver when using an Intel Atom i945 netbook.