更新顯示卡驅動程式的時候到了

最近，兩大開放原始碼瀏覽器－Chromium 和 Firefox－的開發者，前後各在其部落格上發表文章，希望使用者可以更新電腦顯示卡的驅動程式，以便能順利使用最新的硬體加速功能。以下為部分重點節錄：

• Chromium - GPU acceleration + old drivers = :(
  

  However, as we’ve rolled out features like WebGL and GPU-accelerated HTML5 video, we noticed a troubling trend: users with old graphics drivers experienced a significant increase in crashes when using these features...

  ... Here are some steps you can take to maximize the chances that Chrome will run fully hardware-accelerated on your computer:
  
  

  1. Use the latest major version of your operating system (such as Windows 7 or Mac OS 10.6)
  2. Install all system updates and driver updates that are available for your system.

• Firefox - Upgrade your graphics drivers!
  

  However, when we turned these features on by default in nightly builds around September last year, and then in Beta 7, crash statistics and bug reports quickly showed that bugs in graphics drivers were often making these features misbehave...

  The resulting driver blocklist is worth reading if you want to get the most out of Firefox 4:
  
  

  1. Windows users with Intel cards: you need a very recent driver.
  2. Windows users with NVIDIA cards: you need driver version 257.21 or newer.
  3. Windows users with ATI cards: you need driver version 10.6 or newer.
  4. Instructions are also given for Mac and X11 (Linux/Unix).

由上面節錄的內容可知，舊的驅動程式容易因為本身有 bug，而導致啟用硬體加速功能的新版瀏覽器當掉，所以如果可以的話，就更新一下顯示卡的驅動程式吧！