Intel's Linux Driver Continues To Be Most Popular

[Kano]

Well ivy bridge hd 4000 can run doom3 at full hd on linux (at least for single player it is fast enough), many other (simpler) games as well. However the drivers lack support for newer glsl levels so that games like rage do not run via wine. I would not expect that a gamer runs intel gfx on a desktop - but maybe he has got a laptop. It is definitely enough for some games but certainly not for new blockbuster titles which run on win only. But even there it is a bit slower than amd trinity chips. Interestingly speed did not improve much when going from mesa 8.0.4 to 9.0 - opengl 3 was advertised but doom3 for example did not run faster - using lower detail settings than ultra even show a rendering error.

Desktop users can easly buy a dedicated card - preferred nvidia - and play the games they miss, just laptop users have to wait...

[ther]

Not just, and not just personal computers running Linux.

But for graphics workstations and video game software Microsoft Windows is a better choice, or the only choice.

This is not necessarily true for workstations. Our lab has just purchased a workstation with a decent NVIDIA graphics card for GPU computing. Most of time we are using linux on it. One reason is that there are many more scientific computing libraries running on linux, so it is much easier to run our program on linux than on windows. Furthermore, windows 7 seems to have problems on our machine: whenever it wakes up from sleep mode, it goes blue-screen. As a result, we have to disable power management if we want to use windows, which is ridiculous given the fact that there is higher power consumption for workstations than for ordinary PC's.

[rrohbeck]

Bought a SB i3 laptop for $400, installed Debian and the graphics simply worked. No futzing around with proprietary drivers. Video is perfect.
Hopefully this will be a kick in the butt for AMD and nVidia. FOSS support for HD8000 from the start?

Oh and I'm running KDE4. It's come a long way and just works too - after I experienced some showstopper bugs (like hung terminals) in XFCE4.

[nightmarex]

I think Arch is labeled as "Linux" on the graph however it's probably a tainted stat if it's all unnamed Linux's. Gaming on Linux doesn't usually require massive amounts of GPU unless you're using Wine. I have a moderate system but all the "native" type games (HiB and Desura) don't even began to push it. One exception maybe Xonotic but I can still play that max settings 1920x1080 resolution ~200 fps. For what we have now any Intel with HD onboard should suffice and it's cheaper than adding a dedicated video card so the trend doesn't surprise me much. With maybe the exception of AMD's apu's not being more popular. Driver issues aside of course.