Display Drivers Linux Reviews & Articles

There have been 1,040 Linux hardware reviews and benchmark articles on Phoronix for display drivers. Separately, check out our news section for related product news.

With the recent NVIDIA 550.54.14 Linux driver release the R550 series is now out as stable. One of the prominent changes with the NVIDIA R550 Linux driver is bringing the GeForce and workstation GPU support up to "CERTIFIED" quality when using NVIDIA's open kernel modules that are distributed as part of their driver package. Previously the open-source (out-of-tree) kernel modules were just certified for their data center GPUs while now they are basically acknowledging that they are in good shape too for GeForce and workstation products. In this article are some benchmarks of the open and proprietary kernel driver options of the NVIDIA R550 Linux driver.

While there have been efforts by AMD over the years to make it easier to port codebases targeting NVIDIA's CUDA API to run atop HIP/ROCm, it still requires work on the part of developers. The tooling has improved such as with HIPIFY to help in auto-generating but it isn't any simple, instant, and guaranteed solution -- especially if striving for optimal performance. Over the past two years AMD has quietly been funding an effort though to bring binary compatibility so that many NVIDIA CUDA applications could run atop the AMD ROCm stack at the library level -- a drop-in replacement without the need to adapt source code. In practice for many real-world workloads, it's a solution for end-users to run CUDA-enabled software without any developer intervention. Here is more information on this "skunkworks" project that is now available as open-source along with some of my own testing and performance benchmarks of this CUDA implementation built for Radeon GPUs.

One of the new features to look forward to with the upcoming Linux 6.8 kernel cycle is the merging of the experimental "Xe" Intel kernel graphics driver. This driver has been in development for quite a while but has reached the state now at which Intel is comfortable with developing it further while in the mainline kernel tree.

Given the recent launch of the Intel Arc Graphics A580 for under $200, I've been working on a fresh round of Intel / AMD Radeon / NVIDIA GeForce Linux gaming/graphics and compute benchmark results. Next week that fresh arsenal of Linux graphics benchmarks on the very latest drivers will be published but for today is a look at the most surprising aspect: the OpenCL-focused GPU compute benchmarks.

For those using the stock kernel and Mesa drivers when running Ubuntu Linux, the upgrade from Ubuntu 23.04 to the newly-released Ubuntu 23.10 can mean some nice graphics performance improvements for Intel Arc Graphics users. Here is a look at some Arc Graphics A770 benchmarks on Ubuntu 23.04 to 23.10 plus the gains that are coming up when moving to Linux 6.6 and Mesa 23.3-devel.

With my Raspberry Pi 5 review and benchmarks I focused on the CPU performance of the quad-core Cortex-A76 2.4GHz Broadcom SoC powering this new single board computer, but the graphics upgrade are just as equally impressive. Here is a look at the open-source driver support and performance for the Raspberry Pi 5's VideoCore VII GPU.

With the in-development NVK driver merged for Mesa 23.3 to provide open-source NVIDIA Vulkan API support when paired with the Nouveau kernel driver and the necessary Nouveau kernel driver improvements coming with Linux 6.6 for supporting this driver, Phoronix readers have been eager for some benchmarks... Well, here are some benchmarks on the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20 and RTX 30 series when comparing the latest NVK+Nouveau code compared to the proprietary NVIDIA Linux graphics driver stack.

Just days after covering a recent ~10% speed-up for the Intel Arc Graphics on Linux, another optimization has landed in Mesa 23.3-devel for further enhancing Intel's latest graphics wares with their open-source driver stack.

Merged to Mesa 23.2-devel recently was an Intel Arc Graphics driver change to improve performance. This ended up being a rather significant improvement to performance and in today's article is a look at the performance impact of the recent Mesa work by Intel engineers to better the Arc Graphics family.

It's been a while since last looking at the Zink performance for this OpenGL implementation built atop the Vulkan APIs, but with all of the Zink progress by Valve's Mike Blumenkrantz and others, here is a fresh round of testing. This article is seeing how for Mesa Git the performance of Zink on the RADV Vulkan driver compares to that of the native RadeonSI driver while testing with both the Radeon RX 7600 and RX 7900 XTX graphics cards.

Kicking off a number of interesting articles over the week ahead for the Phoronix 19th birthday week is a fresh look at how AMD's official open-source Linux Vulkan driver "AMDVLK" compares to Mesa's RADV Vulkan driver that tends to be more popular with Linux gamers and is the driver backed by Valve, Red Hat, and other stakeholders.

From early December to late February there was an absence of new Compute-Runtime updates for that open-source stack for providing OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support for Intel graphics hardware on Linux. It was out of trend as they worked to move from a weekly~biweekly release rhythm to a monthly release cadence while taking extra time for making various other changes too. After that three month lull, they are back to pushing out new compute updates and damn it's looking nice. At least in my testing, the progress they've quietly made over the past few months has been very nice for the compute stack compatibility/support and performance.

With recent NVIDIA's proprietary driver updates continuing to refine their Wayland support, the open-source AMDGPU Linux graphics drivers continuing to be enhanced, and work on the GNOME desktop with Mutter compositor continuing to advance, today's benchmarking article is looking at how the GNOME session under X.Org and Wayland for (X)Wayland is performing across various Linux games. It's been a while since I last ran a X.Org vs. (X)Wayland Linux gaming comparison so today's article is a fresh look from Ubuntu 22.10 while moving to the very latest graphics drivers and newest Steam Play Experimental state.

Following the Windows vs. Linux benchmarks with Intel Arc Graphics from last week, in today's article is a look at how the Intel Arc Graphics A750 and A770 are competing to the AMD Radeon graphics when using the very latest Linux 6.2 kernel along with Mesa 23.0-devel for providing the very latest open-source graphics driver support from each vendor.

Following the year-end looks at Windows 11 vs. Linux graphics/gaming performance for AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards, today's article is my first look at the Windows 11 vs. Linux performance for Intel Arc Graphics with the flagship A770 graphics card.

Last week was a fresh look at the AMD Radeon graphics/gaming performance between Windows and Linux using the very latest drivers. Today the testing wrapped up from some holiday benchmarking looking at the NVIDIA GeForce performance under Windows 11 and Ubuntu 22.10 Linux for how the drivers on both operating systems are currently competing.

With the end of the year upon us it's a great time to see how the Windows vs. Linux gaming performance is looking as we enter 2023. In particular, it's interesting on the AMD Radeon side with the open-source Linux graphics driver stack having made great gains this year thanks to the continued investment by AMD and heavy contributions by Valve to the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver that is used by the Steam Deck and commonly in general by Linux gamers. Here is a look at the Windows vs. Linux GPU performance both for the mature RDNA2 support as well as the recently-released RDNA3 graphics.

While NVIDIA is already out with multiple GeForce RTX 40 series products, coming only now with the Linux 6.2 kernel is initial open-source 3D acceleration support for the GeForce RTX 30 "Ampere" graphics processors. Here is my initial experience with this open-source NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series support in Linux 6.2.

Last month when the Intel Arc Graphics A750 and A770 reached retail availability, there was open-source support available for Linux users assuming you were on a new enough kernel and Mesa release plus having to activate the preliminary/experimental hardware support flag. In the time since the open-source Intel dGPU Linux graphics driver support has continued to mature and with the upcoming Linux 6.2 kernel is where DG2/Alchemist graphics have been promoted to stable / supported out-of-the-box. Given this milestone and the upstream Mesa code for the Intel ANV Vulkan and Iris Gallium3D drivers continuing to mature, here are some fresh benchmarks of the Intel Arc Graphics A750/A770 under Linux.

With this weekend having seen more Zink refactoring code land and Zink being faster than RadeonSI at least for some operations, it was time to fire up some fresh benchmarks of this generic OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation. From the newest Mesa code this weekend after the latest Zink patches were merged, here is a look at how the Zink performance is compared to the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver's native OpenGL support. All of the testing was done using an AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card.

With Mesa 22.2 bringing many new features, you may be curious about how the performance of this next Mesa3D release is looking. For your viewing pleasure today are benchmarks of Mesa 22.2 back from the day it was branched against that of the stock Mesa 22.0 on Ubuntu 22.04 if you have been wondering whether it's worthwhile upgrading... Benchmarks for this article from the current-generation Radeon RX 6700 XT and RX 6800 XT graphics cards.

While Ubuntu 22.04 LTS was just released over one month ago, it is shipping on the Linux 5.15 kernel that was already two stable series behind at release time but chosen as the default due to its long-term support status. Ubuntu 22.04 also shipped with Mesa 22.0 as the latest stable version albeit the open-source OpenGL/Vulkan graphics drivers are quick to advance. So if you've been thinking about upgrading Mesa or the Linux kernel on your Ubuntu 22.04 system for better Linux gaming performance, here are some benchmarks looking at such performance impact for AMD RDNA2 / Radeon RX 6000 series graphics.

As outlined in yesterday's extensive article about NVIDIA's new open-source Linux kernel GPU driver, currently for consumer GeForce RTX GPUs the driver is considered of "alpha quality" while NVIDIA's initial focus has been on data center GPU support. In any event with having lots of Turing/Ampere GPUs around, I've been trying out this new open-source Linux kernel driver on the consumer GPUs. In particular, I've been curious about the performance of using this open-source kernel driver relative to the default, existing closed-source kernel driver. Here are some early benchmarks.

The day has finally come: NVIDIA IS PUBLISHING THEIR LINUX GPU KERNEL MODULES AS OPEN-SOURCE! To much excitement and a sign of the times, the embargo has just expired on this super-exciting milestone that many of us have been hoping to see for many years. Over the past two decades NVIDIA has offered great Linux driver support with their proprietary driver stack, but with the success of AMD's open-source driver effort going on for more than a decade, many have been calling for NVIDIA to open up their drivers. Their user-space software is remaining closed-source but as of today they have formally opened up their Linux GPU kernel modules and will be maintaining it moving forward. Here's the scoop on this landmark open-source decision at NVIDIA.

Recently I carried out some tests looking at the performance of Zink for OpenGL implemented atop the Vulkan API in a generic manner that works across drivers. With the state of Mesa 22.1, all of Zink's recent improvements are paying off and here is a quick look at where the performance stands against using the RadeonSI OpenGL driver.

With Mesa 22.1 having been branched and working its way towards release in early to mid May, it's a good time to deliver some fresh Linux gaming benchmarks on the latest GPU drivers. In this article are some reference benchmark results of various AMD Radeon graphics cards on Mesa 22.1-rc1 as of branching paired with Linux 5.17 and then benchmarked against NVIDIA's latest driver and various GeForce RTX GPUs.

With SPECViewPerf 2020 finally released for Linux I was curious to see how AMD's open-source "RadeonSI" Gallium3D driver within Mesa would compare to the performance offered by AMD's proprietary OpenGL Linux driver. After all, that longstanding proprietary driver, which is distributed as part of their Radeon Software for Linux driver package, has code in common with their Windows OpenGL driver and has previously been talked up as the preferred choice for workstation customers. Well, the latest open-source driver stack was outright kicking mud at that legacy binary blob for SPECViewPerf 2020 as well as the ParaView workstation visualization software.

With NVIDIA's newly-introduced 510 Linux driver series paired with the latest XWayland and a modern Wayland compositor like the newest GNOME/Mutter packages, the NVIDIA (X)Wayland experience is in great shape and delivering comparable performance to a traditional X.Org session. The NVIDIA Wayland support with GBM usage has stabilized and appears to be in good shape for the upcoming Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release. Here are some benchmarks of the NVIDIA 510 driver on the current state of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

It's crazy to think that in a few days it will already be six years since the debut of Vulkan 1.0, but here we are. The Khronos Group is continuing on their two year major update regiment for Vulkan and today debuting Vulkan 1.3 with more extensions moved to core as well as introducing a new "profiles" concept.

Back on Christmas Eve I noted how the Linux 5.16 performance was looking real good for AMD APUs as a performance improvement not widely noted to that point with significant uplift over Linux 5.15 stable. The good news is Linux 5.16 is set to debut as stable today and the benchmark results with AMD APU graphics is looking very promising after carrying out tests on additional available systems.