fglrx on the desktop -- nowhere near as bad as it used to be

[Blacksmith]

I also think the comparison between the closed src drivers is not productive as i appears that the performance does depend on amongst other things on what one wish's. Currently I am running both Nvidia and AMD cards using closed src drivers and i do not have any major complaints on either driver or card. I do not use wine mainly working on simulation programming using OpenGL, watching DVD's, photo work, model building with Blender,some minor games and a __small__ amount of web viewing.
The open src Radeon driver while much improved is still nowhere near up to the ability of either closed src driver in rendering a complex terrain view with many objects present. Although I am running the latest open src radeon driver on my general work machine. My other machines one using and Nvidia GTX560 super over clocked the other a Radeon 5870, both close src. This machine uses a Radeon 4870. I use debian both testing and unstable.

Blacksmith

[mibo]

Disabling vdpau is easy - if you installed flash into your home:

sed -i s/libvdpau/libvdpax/g ~/.mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so

Otherwise find the libflashplayer.so file.

Thank you for that command. The flashplayer behaves much better, now. No more flash videos gleaming through other windows. They just show up in their own window, now.
On the other hand, the Nvidia 275 beta driver still shows slow downs of my kde.