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A month ago NVIDIA had introduced the Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU) that brought PureVideo-like features to Linux. Our initial benchmarks of this video decoding API within NVIDIA's binary driver were quite favorable as it was able to dramatically cut down on the CPU usage when playing H.264 video files. To see how well NVIDIA's VDPAU really is though, we have carried out some more thorough testing now and our hardware consists of a CPU we purchased for $20 USD and a NVIDIA GeForce graphics card that retails for just $30. Can this very low-end hardware manage to play high definition videos under Linux?

The last time we looked in-depth at HDMI support on Linux was last December when talking about HDMI with the ATI Catalyst Linux driver. Since then there has been improvements in a number of drivers for different hardware. In this article we have a brief overview on the status of HDMI support in the Intel, NVIDIA, and ATI Linux drivers.

Seven months after the release of OpenSolaris 2008.05 (a.k.a. Project Indiana) its successor was finally released earlier this week. OpenSolaris 2008.11 was released on Tuesday with many updated packages and new features. To see how this new work has affected the performance of Sun's OpenSolaris operating system, we have benchmarked both releases through some different tests.

With the EXT4 file-system being marked as stable in the forthcoming Linux 2.6.28 kernel, and some Linux distributions potentially switching to it as an interim step until the btrfs file-system is ready, we decided it was time to benchmark this journaled file-system for ourselves. We ran a number of disk-centric Linux benchmarks along with several of our real-world tests from the Phoronix Test Suite to gauge how well the EXT4 file-system performance will be noticed by desktop users and computer gamers. We have compared these EXT4 results to the EXT3, XFS, and ReiserFS file-systems.

We previously had looked at the ATI Radeon HD 4550 and Radeon HD 4670, but if you are looking for a graphics card that's positioned between the two and costs less, there is the Radeon HD 4650. The Radeon HD 4650 is clocked the same as the Radeon HD 4550, but is based upon the RV730PRO GPU and is able to provide a bit more processing power than the lesser RV710 solution. Sapphire though manufactures a Radeon HD 4650 graphics card that operates well beyond the reference core and memory frequencies for the RV730PRO and sells it at a very affordable price. In this article we are seeing how well the Sapphire Radeon HD 4650 512MB OC graphics card can perform under Linux.

Earlier this year we shared that Valve's Source Engine is coming to Linux after receiving some information that pointed in this direction. In addition, a year ago Valve Software was publicly looking for a senior software engineer to port Windows-based games to Linux platform. There have long been rumors and hopes among Linux users that Steam games would become natively available for Linux, but we have additional confirmation that Valve Software has ported their Steam game client to Linux. In Valve's most recent title, Left 4 Dead, there are shared Linux libraries shipping alongside this Windows game client.

With Fedora 10 finally entering the world earlier this week, we have performed benchmarks comparing the performance of Ubuntu 8.10 and Fedora 10. In our testing we used both the 32-bit and 64-bit builds of each distribution and then ran a series of automated tests through the Phoronix Test Suite.

Over the past few weeks we have been providing several in-depth articles looking at the performance of Ubuntu Linux. We had begun by providing Ubuntu 7.04 to 8.10 benchmarks and had found the performance of this popular Linux distribution to become slower with time and that article was followed up with Mac OS X 10.5 vs. Ubuntu 8.10 benchmarks and other articles looking at the state of Ubuntu's performance. In this article, we are now comparing the 64-bit performance of Ubuntu 8.10 against the latest test releases of OpenSolaris 2008.11 and FreeBSD 7.1.

In addition to VIA announcing a register documentation drop and driver partnership, S3 Graphics, which is a VIA Technologies joint venture company, has announced a new graphics card. Earlier this year S3 announced the Chrome 440 GTX, but today's press release christens the Chrome 500 series. The Chrome 500 series is compatible with OpenGL 3.0 (and Microsoft DirectX 10.1) and is quite an affordable graphics card.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.