On Mon, 9 Jul 2007, yk wrote:
Hi,there.
I've been wondering the question "Is video card driver really necessary for
my Linux box?(quite dummy,I know)" since the very first time installation of
Fedora~
I mean,the universal video card driver sailed with fedora is good.
What's more,I broke my fedora when I try to install a ATI driver once~
So would you guys let me know is there *any* goodies that a video card
driver can do to me?
It really depends on your video card.
Hardware acceleration is a good thing. If you use anything that needs
OpenGL or any sort of 3D acceleration, then you may need to consider the
"commercial" drivers. (That is, if there is support for your video card.
ATI does not support all the cards they currently sell. Always check the
manufacturer's site for more information.)
More and more modern programs need hardware and/or 3D acceleration. It
used to be just games and CAD programs. Now it is desktop environments
like Compiz/Beryl/Compiz-Fusion-bjork-bjork-bjork, screensavers, animation
packages, and whatever else seemed like a good idea at the time.
I have used various incarnations of with and without hardware
acceleration. Even with the closed source driver issues, having hardware
acceleration is far less frustrating than not having it.
--
"ANSI C says access to the padding fields of a struct is undefined.
ANSI C also says that struct assignment is a memcpy. Therefore struct
assignment in ANSI C is a violation of ANSI C..."
- Alan Cox
