My graphics card is a ATi Radeon 9200, 128Mb video ram. I have an Athlon XP 2700+ Throroughbred, 2167Mhz, 333Mhz fsb, and 512Mb ram. I have the ATi drivers installed, I get around 2000fps in glxgears. I do not have DRI Enabled in any way in my kernel, 2.4.6-gentoo-r9. However, anything using OpenGL, games, glxgears, etc, will freeze at a random time. If the application has sound, the sound will continue to play, but the keyboard and mouse will stop, same for the display. A hard reboot is required. Even the "magic" sysRq key will not work. Can anyone help me fix this?

Instead of using ATI's driver (just wait untill better ones come out) use XFree's or Xorgs DRI drivers. I got amazing performance out of a 9200se (crappier then urs) on Steam CS, and other games, on a Athlon 2000+ 512 megs of 2100 ram, on an ASUS MoBo. (mobos count, chipset sometimes fuk up ATI drivers, u gotta check around.) uninstall the ATI drivers, or just switch in KDE's control center thing, Ill have to look into this some since I dont know too much about Gentoo. Other then that, use DRI. It works. Ill reply back later, if I can find out what the driver is.

dri does work magic, i have a ati igp 340m (laptop) and i get 700-1000fps! counter-strike is playable at 800x600 opengl

alright, now how to use these xorg dri drivers?

(I still leave dri out of my kernel right?)