As I alluded to earlier, I am out of the office this week. With me to Italy I took a Samsung NC10 that is loaded with an Intel Atom processor, Intel integrated graphics, an OCZ solid-state drive, and 2GB of DDR2 RAM. Prior to leaving I loaded it up with a clean install of the Ubuntu 9.04 release candidate, but what a mistake that was.

A month ago we compared Intel's graphics performance between Ubuntu 8.10 and the latest Ubuntu 9.04 daily snapshot at the time. With those tests we found Intel's performance had degraded significantly. However, with many new graphics packages having been released since then, we have carried out some additional tests this morning to look at where the Intel Linux graphics performance stands today.

Following the release of Fedora 13 Alpha this week we delivered Intel graphics benchmarks looking at the performance of an Intel Atom Netbook using the very latest kernel, DRM, and Mesa packages that Fedora is known for carrying.

Earlier this month we provided a launch-day preview of the P55 Chipset on Linux along with benchmarks from the Core i5 750 and Core i7 870, which are the new quad-core Lynnfield processors. We noticed some odd performance issues under Linux when testing out these new processors, but Intel has since chimed in and we are in the process of running an updated set of tests.

While the ATI Radeon HD 5800 graphics cards were introduced last week, the open-source support for the Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 series is finally maturing. In this article we have benchmarks showing the 2D performance between these two driver options with both an R600 and R700 graphics card.

In conjunction with the launch of the Core i3/i5 Clarkdale processors last month, Intel introduced the H55 and H57 Chipsets...As our first Linux review of an Intel H55 motherboard we are checking out the ECS Elitegroup H55H-M

Last week we published benchmarks looking at the ATI Radeon KMS vs. UMS performance and found the user-space mode-setting support with the ATI driver to perform significantly faster than the newer kernel mode-setting routes in most instances. To see how the performance difference is on the Intel we ran a set of benchmarks on this side.

Various changes improve the performance and functionality of drivers for graphics chips in the latest Intel mobile processors. Nouveau now supports the Fermi chips used on recent GeForce graphics cards. The Radeon driver in 2.6.36 adds support for underscan, HyperZ and tiling. Extensions for the KDB debugger and Intel's KMS driver allow new debugging functionality

Back in February we reported on the first signs of open-source support for Intel's Sandybridge, a.k.a. their sixth-generation Intel graphics processor integrated on their upcoming CPUs.