This Week: VDPAU, X.Org, Gaming

This week at Phoronix the news coverage was a bit less than normal since your's truly is currently at Oktoberfest 2009 in Munich, but there were still many important news happenings.

When it comes to our Linux graphics news coverage, there was a huge patch presented by Zack Rusin that brings Geometry Shaders to Mesa. X Server 1.7 also finally reached its first release candidate with the hope that X.Org 7.5 will still be released late this month or early next month. In the proprietary graphics field, NVIDIA released a standalone VDPAU library and we learned they are working to create a VDPAU protocol.

In regards to Linux gaming, an indie game studio was amazed at their Linux sales in that they actually outpaced Windows sales and had the highest conversion rate to customers between Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. We were also presented with the good news that id Tech 5 will likely be ported to Linux, contrary to earlier reports. The Unigine game engine has also picked up new features.

Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 6 also made it out on Thursday and then just this morning we learned that Ubuntu 10.04 LTS is codenamed the Lucid Lynx.

With regard to benchmarking at Phoronix, we released Phoronix Test Suite 2.2 Alpha 2 (a.k.a. "Bardu") with new features and test profile improvements. We also published BFS Scheduler benchmarks and Ubuntu 9.10 home encryption benchmarks.

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