Persuing /. I noticed an article about the fact the ATI has released drivers for The Radeon 8500 all the way up to the 9700. The ATI drivers page is here .

Has anyone tried these drivers yet? If so how do they perform? I very reluctantly just picked up a Ti 4600 since it had support on Linux. Prior to this I have generally been an ATI person. If these drivers are worth thier salt it migh pull me back.

Using ATI 8500 DV on amd 2200 based system, redhat 8 found it and installed it ok. The display panel shows that I can enable 3d acceleration.

What should i run to test it more extensively?

John

Welcome to LQ, John.

Some games like Q3A, Return To Castle Wolfenstein, and the like. Or, if you can't download them (i.e. bandwidth) then you should already have TuxRacer on your system, if not on the install CDs?

What can I say, ATI are lousy company and developers, where is the source (well, if they chose not to release it, it's up to them, but read the following or) or at least precompiled binaries archived in tarball? Binary they provide is only good for RPM based distros (particularly RH and MDK), assume I have an ATI card and I am running Slackware, and I don't want to mess around with RH8 or MDK rpm's.

rpm2tgz Boris

ok looks like the original install of rh 8 did see 8500 but installed using older drivers. i downloaded new drivers from ati and am working on getting them installed correctly.

Couple of questions ... i am running on athlon system rpm package supplied by ati ends in "*586.rpm". Can't tell from doc supplied by ati whether there are other versions of package available and/or if 586.rpm package should work ok on athlon.

ati supplied some kind of software/script supposed to help the reconfiguration of X after the package installs.

Will I need to reconfigure and rebuild kernel after the install? ati doc doesn't say to do that ... also received some funky messages about tainting the kernel while the package was installing.

Ideas?

You don't need to do a recompile..the drivers work fine but you must force the install, the read me tells you how to set up the utiliy and such..worked perfeclty for me.