On Sun, 12 Feb 2012 23:32:04 -0500
Kristopher John Gamrat <chaotickjg@...> wrote:

> On Sunday 12 February 2012 11:23:02 pm /dev/ammo42 wrote:
> > On Sun, 12 Feb 2012 23:09:18 -0500
> > Kristopher John Gamrat <chaotickjg@...> wrote:
> > > I hope it's not "required", but sure would be a great feature if
> > > they made it "optional". Not all graphics cards have good drivers
> > > that enable the hardware accelerations, and not every Linux user
> > > will want to use proprietary ATI/AMD or nVidia cards (I've not
> > > checked the status of the nouveau driver (nor do I care since I'm
> > > not an nVidia user), and I'm not aware of a similar project for
> > > ATI/AMD cards).
> > There is a FOSS radeon driver for which some developers at AMD are
> > paid to work on it, and on my experience it works OK both for light
> > 3D games and KDE4 compositing (even better than AMD proprietary
> > driver for the latter). And compared to Intel drivers I've almost
> > never seen it crash.
> 
> I'm using an Intel card right now (same one since December 2009) with
> the FOSS Intel driver. I've never seen any crash cause by the driver,
> all crashes thus far were either a glitch in some program that
> overloaded my CPU, or from overheating (though this usually leads to
> a kernel panic rather than an X.org crash).
> 
> Of course, I rarely run anything that requires 3D acceleration.
I have driver crashes:
-under Slackware 13.1, as soon as I enable KDE 4.4's KWin effects.
(I use Mesa 7.7.1 as 7.8.1 has a severe performance regression with
StepMania)
-under Slackware 13.1, after too many cycles of suspend/resume (highly
variable)
-under Slackware 13.37, when using KDE 4.5 with or without KWin
effects, after at least a half dozen of hours (highly variable)
-under Slackware 13.37, when I play a Xv-accelerated video, then open
an OpenGL game, then close it when the video is still playing (often)

On my AMD laptop, with FOSS drivers, I can simultaneously have KWin
effects, play a video and launch a 3D game without any crash and with
reasonable preformance.
>