July 18, 2007 -- When it comes to binary display drivers under Linux, NVIDIA is generally known as the company that's able to offer drivers that are on par with their Windows driver. Unlike the known performance issues with the ATI/AMD fglrx driver where it's not uncommon for the driver to be 50% slower than the Windows Catalyst equivalent, the NVIDIA Linux driver has performed roughly the same if not faster in some cases. This has also been true for the NVIDIA Solaris driver as the performance bastion can largely be attributed to the shared driver code-base between all NVIDIA-supported platforms (Windows, Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD). However, with the GeForce 8 series we have come across some unusual issues that are limiting the performance of the GeForce 8 series under Linux and Solaris. In this article, we have additional information on these austere performance problems along with benchmarks showing the frame-rate differences between Windows XP and Linux.

July 11, 2007 -- Since January of this year we have been telling you that AMD has been silently working on R600 (Radeon HD 2000) support for their proprietary Linux "fglrx" driver. However, for the end-user the support isn't complete and still equates to being useless. But how does the recently announced Avivo R500 driver function with the newer R600 series? We have tried out an RV610 GPU in several configurations under Linux, and in this article we will tell you what works and what doesn't right now for the Radeon HD 2000 series.

July 08, 2007 -- The NVIDIA GeForce 6100 and 6150 integrated graphics processors have been relatively popular among Linux and Windows users. These IGPs have been common in HTPC setups with the NVIDIA driver working out well with MythTV. NVIDIA's GeForce 6100/6150 parts have also appeared in a number of desktop systems, and while these IGPs cannot really handle modern games, they have no troubles with Beryl or Compiz. However, it's now time that the GeForce 6 series moves on with NVIDIA having recently introduced the NVIDIA GeForce 7025 and 7050 with the nForce 630a as the replacement for the GeForce 6100 and 6150 with the nForce 410/430. We have decided to look at the NVIDIA GeForce 7050 today as we compare it to the GeForce 6150 and test it in a variety of Linux graphics benchmarks.

June 28, 2007 -- Today AMD has officially released their low-end and mainstream graphics cards in the Radeon HD 2000 family, the Radeon HD 2400 and Radeon HD 2600 series respectively. While these new graphics cards should already be at your favorite retailer or presently in route, where are the Linux drivers? AMD's high-end Radeon HD 2900XT was pushed out the door in early May, but we have yet to see any official support for that or any of the graphics processors in the Radeon HD 2000 series under Linux.

May 27, 2007 -- We thought it was already clear what graphics processors and drivers work and don't work with Linux desktop eye candy such as Beryl and Compiz, but it seems based upon the number of e-mails we have been receiving along with messages in community bulletin boards that the line isn't so clear after all. For those that have never tried out Beryl, it is a compositing window manager branched from Compiz (though Beryl will merge back with Compiz soon) that provides a variety of window decorations and other desktop "eye candy" for X.Org users. In this article we hope to make it clear for you what GPUs will make your Linux desktop look the most pleasurable and what ones just sweat thinking about these desktop effects. We have taken eight different systems, benchmarked them using the Beryl Benchmark, and have our thoughts on these ATI/AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA solutions with Beryl v0.2.

May 14, 2007 -- It's late, but it's finally here. This morning AMD will be formally announcing their long-awaited Radeon HD 2000 series, or perhaps better known as the ATI R600 GPU. The AMD Radeon HD 2000 series features DirectX 10.0 (well, for those that use Microsoft products), Avivo HD, a programmable tessellation unit, CrossFire support, and much more. This morning we have our technology preview of ATI/AMD's next generation GPUs along with what's in store for Linux and the R600 series support.

April 28, 2007 -- The GeForce 8500GT is NVIDIA's value-priced contender in the GeForce 8 series. The 8500GT has a 450MHz core clock and 400MHz memory clock, but how is this $100 creation able to compete against other graphics cards from ATI and NVIDIA? We have our hands on the passively-cooled Gigabyte GeForce 8500GT 256MB graphics card and have run our usual Linux graphics tests along with some of our first overclocking attempts with this new solution. Without further ado, we present the world's first Linux benchmarks of the NVIDIA GeForce 8500GT.

April 21, 2007 -- We have been waiting and waiting for NVIDIA to release their new Linux display drivers and today we can report that they finally did. Sneaking out of the NVIDIA camp on Friday night was the 100.14.03 Beta driver for Linux. However, at this time there is no 100.14.03 equivalent for FreeBSD or Solaris users.

January 04, 2007 -- With the great deal of articles that we publish in regards to NVIDIA and ATI display drivers, it is very evident that at this time NVIDIA has the lead when it comes to the frame-rate performance -- with their Linux drivers performing nearly the same as their Windows ForceWare counterpart. ATI has been struggling to improve the performance of their fglrx drivers, and while they had made strides last year, they still have a great deal of work ahead of them. However, one of the areas that often is not mentioned in Phoronix articles is the image quality between ATI and NVIDIA's hardware with their respective drivers. In this article today we will be looking at both company's image quality under Linux in video playback and gaming environments.

December 09, 2006 -- While NVIDIA has already introduced their G80 8800GTX, after several delays the ATI/AMD camp still has not delivered their next-generation graphics processor: the R600 GPU. While the R600 remains behind closed doors the X1950 remains the fastest Radeon series available. Among the products in the X1950 family is the X1950 CrossFire, X1950PRO, X1950XT, and X1950XTX. What we are looking at today is the X1950PRO, which for this article is coming from ASUS. The ASUS EAX1950PRO offers 256MB of GDDR3, HDCP support, heatpipe-based GPU heatsink, and many more ASUS innovations.