ATI, or AMD’s catalyst drivers for linux have come a loooong way. They are currently rather good, but can be very buggy with certain configurations. Partial hardware acceleration works fine and tearing using XV has been substantially reduced. You must make care to configure xorg.conf properly otherwise your X server will crash. Well to be more specific using Compiz only will not necessarily crash your system independent of the configuration, but when you start using graphics and processor heavy applications you’ll see substantial system instability. For example I used compiz and the default xorg.conf for a long time with little problems. But then I threw MythTV into the mix. Its processor and graphics requirements caused X to free constantly and predictably. I boiled the problem down to opengl, which is easily disabled in the device section of xorg.conf with the line: Option "OpenGLOverlay" "off" Then also turn off video overlay: Option "VideoOverlay" "off" Then turn on textured video and sync it: Option "TexturedVideo" "on" Option "TexturedVideoSync" "on" For me this substantially increases X stability and I no longer can predictably have a system hard lock. Yes I still have an occasional program free but I dont have to do a hard reboot, which is really annoying. In MythTV you should configure the frontend to use XV-Blit with no deinterlacing if your capturing HD video via firewire. The video playback on an integrated 3300HD chipset is quite impressive and the minimal tearing experienced I expect to be resolved in a realease or two.