Graphic cards, especially VIA and/or nVIDIA
 

Hi!
Here are some questions to those which successfully installed and currently use proprietary graphic card drivers, with special address to those which do know how to deal with either nVIDIA or VIA graphic cards under Linux.
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1) Does the proprietary drivers usually solve X session tasks (thereby replacing the XFree86 driver for instance) or they merely confine to provide a more performant framebuffer for shell sessions?
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2) Since having a VIA VT8235 chipset motherboard, vith integrated VIA UniChrome Graphics, I've just reconfigured my kernel and then installed the proprietary package called as linux-fbdev-kernel-src_20050726.tgz. Now clearly that package does provide a visually more performant console framebuffer, but that is of no help to me since even prefering shell sessions at a very low resolution. Instead, I would be interested in more performant jobs for X sessions. So: am I right in guessing that the mentioned proprietary is of no help under X sessions? If true: is there another driver to improve the X session behaviour of my hardvare? If negative (I mean, in case the mentioned proprietaru driver does also address to X sessions) could anybody please tell me how to exploit that driver under X sessions?
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Grateful thanks for any information on the matter!

For the framebuffer I like this;
http://dev.gentoo.org/~spock/projects/vesafb-tng/
It works well with nvidia cards.
The drivers for X are somthing different.
Most don't use framebuffer in X.

What distro, board and kernel are you on and what progress have you made?