video card driver necessary?

alan alan at clueserver.org
Mon Jul 9 16:27:36 UTC 2007


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




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