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. >