As we alluded to last week, we have been in the process of benchmarking many Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 series graphics cards using the open-source ATI Linux graphics stack with the Mesa R600/700 DRI driver.

While the 3.0 revision to this industry standard graphics API has been around for nearly three years, it's still not fully supported by the open-source Mesa graphics stack. Progress though is being made.

The Khronos Group announced version 1.1 of OpenCL, the multiprocessor programming standard. OpenCL 1.1 features a variety of enhancements, the one that really caught my eye was Improved OpenGL interoperability through efficient sharing of images and buffers by linking OpenCL event objects to OpenGL fence sync object. That'll come in handy.

Following last month's release of Mesa 7.1, Tungsten Graphics began working on Mesa 7.2, which is a stabilized version of this OpenGL implementation that had picked up 3D support for the ATI Radeon R500 and Intel GMA 4-Series.

Last Friday Mesa 7.0 had entered the world. While a number of bugs have been corrected since Mesa 6.5.3, what is most interesting with this release is the support for the OpenGL 2.0 / 2.1 API. We've been waiting on this support so that the open-source drivers can take advantage of it and it's now finally available.

This week there were several interesting stories at Phoronix, if you happened to miss any of them. We started off by sharing that proper multi-seat support for Linux / X.Org is on the way with the new VGA arbitration code coming about. With this new implementation, multiple X Servers can be run side-by-side without needing to use Xephyr or any ugly hacks.

Last week we published Arch Linux vs. Ubuntu benchmarks to finally lay to rest that for the overall system performance the speed of the rolling Arch Linux distribution is not too different from that of Ubuntu when running with similar package versions.

Last month we looked at the cost of running Compiz. Today we are seeing if and how using Mutter, the window manager for the GNOME 3.0 desktop that uses Clutter-based compositing, will affect the performance of several different open-source games.

Last week prior to heading over to Germany for LinuxTag, I had ran a new set of ATI R500 Gallium3D benchmarks with an ATI Radeon X1950PRO graphics card and comparing the latest Mesa/Gallium3D graphics driver performance in the Mesa 7.9-devel Git code with both the Gallium3D and classic Mesa DRI drivers to the older Mesa stack found in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.