Yesterday we delivered benchmarks showing how the open-source ATI Radeon graphics driver stack in Ubuntu 10.04 is comparing to older releases of the proprietary ATI Catalyst Linux driver. Sadly, the latest open-source ATI driver still is no match even for a two or four-year-old proprietary driver from ATI/AMD, but that is with the classic Mesa DRI driver.

This is the first year that there were more people using the open-source ATI driver (through the xf86-video-ati DDX driver) than AMD's official Catalyst (fglrx) driver! There were 3,117 counts for xf86-video-ati, 2,770 for the Catalyst driver, and then 1,185 installations still using the xf86-video-radeonhd driver.

For the month of November we ran the 2009 Linux Graphics Survey, which is a survey in regards to X.Org and the Linux graphics stack that we have been hosting annually for the past three years. This year there was 13,836 results submitted and we have now had the time to go over these results and are publishing all of the numbers today.

For the past month we had been running the 2007 Linux Graphics Survey at Phoronix where we polled users to find out what display hardware they use, what their driver choice(s) are, and their other preferences as it pertains to Linux desktop users on the visual front.

For the past two years we have hosted an annual Linux Graphics Survey in which we ask well over 20,000 users each time their video card preferences, driver information, and other questions about their view of the Linux graphics stack. This survey will run from 31 October to 30 November, 2009.

As we shared a few days ago, Fedora 13 will provide OpenGL acceleration support for NVIDIA graphics cards via the Nouveau driver when installing the Mesa DRI experimental drivers package. There is finally 3D acceleration for NVIDIA graphics cards using an open-source driver on Linux without having to depend upon NVIDIA's official binary driver.

Back in March an announcement came out of NVIDIA as they were getting ready to launch the GeForce GTX 400 "Fermi" graphics cards that they would be dropping support for the xf86-video-nv driver.

Over the past two weeks, we have published a variety of articles looking at different aspects of the open-source Linux graphics stack. These articles range from comparing the Gallium3D and classic Mesa performance to comparing the kernel mode-setting and user-space mode-setting performance.

NVIDIA's open-source Linux efforts as it concerns their GPU support have historically been minimal. The xf86-video-nv driver has been around that provides very basic 2D acceleration and a crippled set of features besides that (no proper RandR 1.2/1.3, KMS, power management, etc) while the code has also been obfuscated to try to protect their intellectual property.