For the past couple of years I've been running 64studio (a Debian-based Linux) with the Matrox unofficial drivers, in dual-head mode. Mostly i use this setup for a digital audio workstation app called 'Ardour'. Everything's been working fine until I upgraded Ardour recently. After the upgrade, Ardour's (timeline like) display became very jerky and I noticed that my cpu was maxed out (permanently at 100% cpu cycles).
I'd never really taken much notice of cpu usage before - but after this problem, I downgraded to the previous version and noticed that my cpu had already been working at 70%, just for this one application.
Someone suggested that maybe my graphics card wasn't using the G400's hardware acceleration and they recommended that I issue this command from a Linux terminal:-
glxinfo|grep direct\ rendering
This produced the output:- Direct rendering: No. Does this mean that my driver isn't using hardware acceleration and if so, is there anything I can do to enable it?