Driver support for ATI boards

[andysimmons]

I'm thinking about getting a Radeon 9700, and I'm mainly wondering how high of a priority ATI has made it to keep their Linux drivers updated in the past. Is it comparable to NVidia? If anyone could tell me what they think of ATI compared to NVidia (I know the hardware specs, just need driver info) I'd appreciate it. Also, if anyone has played newer game (UT 2003, etc.) on a 9700 in Windows and Linux, I'd appreciate any feedback about the performance difference. My GeForce3 is noticeably slower in Linux on the newer games...old (SoF 2) games are about the same though. Thanks.

[bwkaz]

ATI hasn't updated their driver since the first release last November.

So yeah... basically, issues I've seen with it are if you can get the fglxrconfig program to work, you should be OK. Of course, the same applies to ATI's driver as applies to nVidia's -- just install kernel-source, it makes a LOT of headaches go away when you try to compile it because the driver doesn't support your current kernel out of the box. If your kernel is supported out of the box, then you're using an old kernel.