Linux Graphics Trends Over The Past Five Years

Yesterday I posted some Linux hardware statistics going back to 2011 using data collected by the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org. Those yearly metrics hadn't contained any GPU/driver data, but here are those numbers.

The graphics numbers were omitted from yesterday's article as I had to make some tweaks to its parser and post-processor due to the wide assortment of graphics driver/hardware combinations, joining the ATI and AMD data, etc compared to the statistics collection on more basic/uniform hardware components. The sample set used was a maximum of 100,000 systems per year with the data being collected through the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org.

First up is a look at the GPU vendor reporting for the past five years...

AMD has held about a 23% average, NVIDIA a 27% average, and Intel at about 25%. The "other" in this case is significant and due in part to the Phoronix Test Suite being used a lot on servers and VMs. So there is a lot of "Cirrus" devices, even some old Matrox display adapters in workstations show up on OpenBenchmarking.org occasionally, virtual devices from VirtualBox/VMware, AST display hardware on server/workstation boards, etc. But of the proper graphics hardware it shows NVIDIA, Intel, and AMD all competing with a slice of the market.

Here's a better look at things when looking at the OpenGL driver vendors, which eliminates some of the "other" noise... The NVIDIA driver is used on about 40% of the systems while Mesa is on average around 60%. The Intel and AMD drivers use Mesa most commonly but Mesa also shows up when using LLVMpipe as is commonly the case on server/workstation systems not normally dealing with graphics, VirGL for pass-through from VMs more recently, the VMware VMWgfx driver stack, the newer Intel (Open)SWR rasterizer, etc. "Other" then comes down to fglrx/AMDGPU-PRO, the VirtualBox guest driver, etc.

Lastly for now is a look at the DDX (X.Org driver) statistics... We see xf86-video-modesetting taking over since 2015 and is shooting up there where now it's the most common X.Org DDX on Linux desktops. This isn't too surprising since Debian/Ubuntu and others are now defaulting to it in place of hardware-specific DDX drivers. Intel and AMD are also encouraging xf86-video-modesetting over their own DDX drivers, etc. So it's not really surprising with xf86-video-modesetting being universal, 2D is piped over OpenGL with GLAMOR, and this modesetting DDX driver continues getting better.