April 28, 2006 -- Released earlier today was the Quake 4 v1.2.1 point release patch. The major feature to come down the pipeline in Quake 4 v1.2.1 is Hyper-Threading Technology and dual-core support for the Linux binaries. With Quake 4 now supporting Hyper-Threading and dual-core processors, players should expect to find significant performance gains when gaming. Two of the numbers that id Software have stated is a 25% performance jump compared to non Intel Hyper-Threaded CPUs and dual core processors should experience somewhere in the ballpark of a 87% performance boost. At Phoronix, we have examined these performance situations using an Intel Pentium D and Intel Pentium 4 HT CPUs to get a better idea as to what can be expected from upcoming multi-threaded games.

April 21, 2006 -- Back in February of this year, we featured a small arsenal of tests against various NVIDIA graphics cards using Transgaming's Cedega v5.1 demo -- which was recently released at that time. Today we are back again with Cedega v5.1 as we look at its fate under ATI Radeon cards running the proprietary drivers. Is there much to share this time around or has Transgaming and ATI not been the best of associates?

March 29, 2006 -- Released yesterday afternoon was the Quake 4 v1.1 point release patch. Among appending four new maps for professional game-play, there is also a new Forcemodel option as well as Brightskins. Another major feature to come down the pipeline in Quake 4 v1.1 is Hyper-Threading Technology and dual-core support, however, that is presently limited to the Windows version. At Phoronix, we have analyzed the performance abilities of this latest Quake 4 point release under Linux with a Pentium D processor and GeForce 7 solution.

February 21, 2006 -- One of the strongholds preventing computer enthusiasts from switching to Linux is due to the lack of retail games available under Linux. However, TransGaming's Cedega software allows a majority of Microsoft Windows games to run seamlessly under Linux with very little to no end-user modifications required. TransGaming Cedega operates by emulating the Windows 32 APIs including Direct3D, DirectInput, and DirectSound. With the most recent version of Cedega (v5.1) hitting the web last week, we have conducted a series of tests to examine its performance impact on some of the popular titles.

February 14, 2006 -- Nexuiz, one of the popular open-source first person shooter games available for Microsoft Windows as well as Linux on both x86 and x86_64 platforms, has released v1.5 today. Unlike some of the past releases, many of the features in this release are prominent from a new instant action mode to improved artificial intelligence and completely new menus! In addition, there is now smoother net-code, engine optimizations, redone sound effects, all new character skins, new game-modes, new maps, and new characters. For the open-source enthusiast, Nexuiz v1.5 is definitely worth checking out!

February 05, 2006 -- Linux Game Publishing's port of Egosoft's X2 - The Threat has reached a new milestone with the fourth BETA release. Although there are still bugs to be fixed in the game before it ships to gaming distributors, this latest release available exclusively to the closed LGP testing community finally features ATI commercial driver support. Will this be another disappointment for the fans in red, or will this be a crucial win? We have thoroughly tested X2 - The Threat BETA 4 with various ATI Radeon cards as well as a NVIDIA GeForce 6 for comparative numbers.

January 31, 2006 -- Sauerbraten, the experimental gaming engine based upon the popular Cube engine, has sneaked onto the Internet this morning with a new release. The stock game includes support for both single-player and multi-player variants, and as with previous Sauerbraten releases, it offers many of the same abilities and controls as the original Cube. Certainly the game is no Quake 4 but is an exciting action-packed title available for compilation on any major operating system and is completed powered by open-source software.

January 21, 2006 -- Although X2 - The Threat is still under development by the talented folks over at Linux Game Publishing, many of the initial issues seen by the closed BETA community that is testing this game have now been resolved. Twice already we have done game-play performance examinations with the various BETA candidates, but today we are finally delivering some Linux X2 - The Threat screenshots. These images show the various menus available as well as a few cut scenes and in-flight gaming and the integrated benchmark. More images will be delivered upon the retail availability of the game.

January 19, 2006 -- Reaching the closed testing environment just hours ago has been the third BETA candidate for X2 - The Threat, which is presently being ported to Linux by the developers at Linux Game Publishing. This third candidate delivers many performance improvements and is the focus of our benchmarking today to see how the second and third BETA updates fair, after we had tampered with the initial build late last year.

January 02, 2006 -- On December 31, LGP finally sent its first draft of the X2 game off to its closed BETA community. With the game still being under development, there is a fair amount of bugs to speak of but many of the testers have faced an unreliably low level of performance. To show gamers what they will need to expect from this upcoming game, we have ran a slew of benchmarks over X2 v1.4 BETA 1 with various NVIDIA graphics cards.