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November 20, 2008 -- Earlier this year VIA announced they wanted to join the open-source bandwagon by establishing an open-source driver development initiative, releasing documentation and source-code, and to better engage with the Linux community at large. They have made a few small steps over the past few months, but today they have made their largest open-source contribution yet by releasing four programming documentation guides that cover the video, 2D, and 3D programming for their Chrome 9 graphics processor. In addition, they are now partnering with the community-spawned OpenChrome developers.

November 19, 2008 -- If all goes according to plan, the first alpha release for Ubuntu 9.04 (the Jaunty Jackalope) will be released tomorrow. It's not even been one month since the release of Ubuntu 8.10, but this first alpha release will show early signs of what we can expect to see in this next Canonical-sponsored release -- albeit many of the features are still in planning. In this article we will provide a glimpse at what Ubuntu 9.04 should hold in store to captivate Linux desktop users.

November 18, 2008 -- For Linux desktop users interested in a mid-range discrete graphics card there are more choices than ever before with NVIDIA continuing to release new stable Linux drivers as they have done for many years while AMD this year has been making evolutionary leaps compared to their earlier state. AMD is now providing same-day support with all new products, CrossFire on Linux, OverDrive, and many other recently introduced features. NVIDIA and AMD are nearly at a feature parity and even in the past two months they both released new video APIs for Linux (PureVideo / VDPAU and X-Video Bitstream Acceleration, respectively) and they are now battling it out on Linux over performance. We recently looked at AMD's new ATI Radeon HD 4830 mid-range graphics card, but in this article we are comparing it to the NVIDIA GeForce 9800GT, courtesy of Micro-Star International.

November 17, 2008 -- It has been a while since last looking at a Thermaltake chassis at Phoronix, but today we have our hands on the Spedo Advance Chassis. This full tower chassis is made of SECC steel and has seven 5.25" drive bays, but perhaps what is more unique is its dual 230mm fans, 140mm fan, and three 120mm fans (with room for another two). In addition, the Spedo Advance Chassis has an Advance Thermal Chamber 3, Cable Routing Management 3, an HDD relocation canister, and other features designed to satisfy the needs of the most stringent gamers and computer enthusiasts.

November 17, 2008 -- Last year we hosted our first annual Linux Graphics Survey as really the only study that's been done to get a better understanding what the Linux community is using in their computers to fulfill their graphics needs, what their key interests are, and where they are looking for improvements. We're hosting this survey once again so we ask that between now and December 15 you take a few minutes to vote in the 2008 Linux graphics survey.

November 14, 2008 -- Earlier today we shared that NVIDIA is bringing PureVideo features to Linux through a major update in their binary display driver. The NVIDIA 180.06 driver adds VDPAU support on Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD operating systems, with VDPAU being a set of APIs designed by NVIDIA to accelerate video decoding, provide post-processing capabilities, timstamp-based presentation of video frames, and compositing of sub-picture elements. We have now had the time to benchmark the Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix and have seen the benefits of PureVideo features finally arriving on alternative platforms.

November 14, 2008 -- Over the course of the past few months we have been saying that the NVIDIA 180 Linux driver to be released in the fourth quarter of 2008 would hold in store a few interesting features. Well, today that closed-source driver has been released in beta form. This driver adds a new VDPAU API, which provides PureVideo-like features on Linux, adds in CUDA 2.1 support, new workstation performance optimizations, X Render improvements, and other improvements.

November 13, 2008 -- Earlier this week we had published ATI benchmarks of the open-source Mesa stack and X.Org in the Ubuntu releases going back to Ubuntu 7.04. While the open-source graphics drivers have matured a lot over the past eighteen months and many new features have been added, the ATI performance with an R430 GPU really hadn't improved in the newer releases. To see if the open-source Intel situation is any different, we have carried out similar tests with an Intel 945G Chipset across the past four Ubuntu releases.

November 12, 2008 -- The launch of the RV770 GPU earlier this year by AMD was quite successful. The Radeon HD 4850 and Radeon HD 4870 series feature best-in-class performance and Linux customers were greeted by an evolutionary step in ATI/AMD Linux support. Linux users with these graphics cards now have CrossFire, OverDrive, RandR 1.2, X-Video Bitstream Acceleration, and other new functionality. If you are looking for leading performance and all of the bells and whistles on the newest ATI graphics cards but at a lower cost, AMD recently introduced the Radeon HD 4830. In this article we are looking at the Sapphire Radeon HD 4830 512MB under Ubuntu Linux.

November 10, 2008 -- Late last month we published system benchmarks of Ubuntu 7.04 through 8.10 and had found -- at least with the Intel notebook we were using -- that the performance had degraded with time. This article had then resulted in benchmarks of Fedora 7 through 10 and most recently were Mac OS X 10.5 vs. Ubuntu 8.10 benchmarks. In our original article we hadn't focused much upon the graphics tests and we were just using ATI's binary driver, but per a request from Canonical's Bryce Harrington, we have carried out some open-source graphics tests on Ubuntu 7.04 through 8.10 and we started with the ATI performance.

November 08, 2008 -- We've checked out ATI's Radeon HD 4550 low-end graphics card already and found it to be a nice solution for Linux users on a budget, but how does NVIDIA's competitor contend? In this review we are looking at the NVIDIA GeForce 9500GT from Sparkle. This graphics card has 1GB of DDR2 memory along with DVI, HDMI, and DisplayPort connectors.

November 06, 2008 -- The Sound Blaster X-Fi sound card driver for Linux from Creative Labs was awful. That's simply the nicest way to put it. The driver was home to many bugs, initially only supported 64-bit Linux, and it was arriving extremely late. The open-source drivers supporting the Creative X-Fi drivers have also been at a stand still. However, Creative Labs today has finally turned this situation around and they have open-sourced the code to this notorious driver. The source-code for the Creative X-Fi driver is now licensed under the GNU GPLv2.

November 06, 2008 -- Last week we published Ubuntu 7.04 to 8.10 benchmarks from a Lenovo ThinkPad T60 and had found Ubuntu's performance degraded peculiarly over the past year and a half. We then published Fedora 7 to 10 benchmarks covering the same time-frame and from the same exact Intel notebook computer, but the newer releases of Fedora were only marginally slower in a few tests. In our performance exploration of Ubuntu we now have additional tests to publish this morning. This time around we're switching out the hardware we're testing on to Intel's newer Core 2 series and we're comparing the performance of the x86 and x86_64 editions of Ubuntu 8.10 against Apple's Mac OS X 10.5.5 operating system.

November 04, 2008 -- Back in August we had looked at the G45-based Super Micro C2SEA with its integrated Intel GMA X4500HD graphics. The X.Org graphics performance wasn't that bad for being an Intel IGP, but Intel had also introduced the G43 Chipset with Intel X4500 (non-HD) graphics. One of the motherboards to use Intel's G43 is the ASRock G43Twins-FullHD, which we happen to be looking at today. This motherboard that pairs the Intel G43 with an ICH10 Southbridge supports both DDR2 and DDR3 system memory and its video connectors include D-Sub, DVI-D, and DisplayPort.

November 03, 2008 -- It's no secret that much of the code-base that makes up the modern-day X.Org Server is old and in some places bloated. The X.Org Server continues to evolve and has received a number of major additions in recent times, but wouldn't a clean and lighter server that is designed around today's needs be ideal? Red Hat's Kristian Høgsberg has started a new project, which is currently known as Wayland, and is just that: a new lightweight X Server. Wayland isn't just a rewrite of the current X Server, but instead it's a small server that is designed around some of the latest graphics technologies such as kernel mode-setting and the Graphics Execution Manager. Wayland also has its own built-in compositing manager.