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07 December 2009, 11:51

Phoronix publishes Linux Graphics Survey results

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Phoronix has published the results from its 2009 Linux Graphics Survey. The survey of nearly 14,000 Linux users asked questions about graphics cards, drivers, window managers and applications used. According to the results, 40 per cent of survey participants run NVIDIA based graphics cards, while 33 per cent use adapters from ATI/AMD and 25 per cent prefer Intel graphics. Matrox, Via and SIS/XGI adapters made up the remaining graphics cards.

According to Phoronix, 95 per cent of participant systems running NVIDIA hardware use the NVIDIA's binary driver, while only 46 per cent of ATI/AMD users preferred AMD's official Catalyst driver. Phoronix says that it was surprised to learn that more people are now using the open source ATI driver over AMD's official Catalyst driver and it is unsure why. In any case, only about a quarter of respondents preferred to get their video drivers from a vendors website, while the majority of users chose the drivers provided with their distribution.

Just over two thirds of respondents said that they were using some sort of compositing window manager for 3D effects on their desktops. Approximately 37 per cent of users chose Compiz and 22 per cent preferred KDE's KWin window manager. When asked what kind of tasks they engaged in, 84 per cent of survey participants said that they used their systems for video playback, 55 per cent for visual desktop effects, 43 per cent said gaming and 11 per cent for GPU computing.

Forty per cent of users have multiple displays and the majority of those surveyed have displays with a resolution of 1280x1024 or higher. Only twenty two per cent of users have displays with a resolution of less than 1280x1024. Phoronix's results show that the TV-Out display feature is only used by 17 per cent of participants.

Two thirds of users were most interested in video acceleration, while 45 per cent were interested in kernel-based mode-setting (KMS). Power management for graphics hardware was important to 39 per cent of participants. The top three key concerns of users were 3D performance (74 per cent), stability (70 per cent), and 2D performance (55 per cent).

(crve)

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