Hmm. These days I don't use the 3D acceleration for anything but window compositing. I got the impression that for that the AMD drivers are pretty stable? Might see if I can borrow an AMD card from someone and test it out before I spend money.
Re: nouveau - it seems to be an extremely moving target right now; I'll have to build my own kernel, X.org, etc. I basically don't have the time for that, this is my main workstation.
I have a motherboard with onboard ATI HD4200 graphics and run the latest KDE4, and the open source AMD drivers are plenty fine to manage all kinds of shiny effects. They even manage some simpler 3D stuff without problem. I've never had any problems with the stability of the drivers either.
That's an excellent data point, thank you. I was actually looking at motherboards with that chip, and I too am a KDE 4 user. One more question: do standby/hibernation work well?
Suspend to RAM works perfectly. Suspend to disk works when I call it from the command line, but not when I select it from the shutdown menu in KDE. So I imagine it can be made to work by someone willing to look into it.
Re: nouveau - it seems to be an extremely moving target right now; I'll have to build my own kernel, X.org, etc. I basically don't have the time for that, this is my main workstation.