damage to ati video card?
 

i have an ati 9600 and was wondering since there no drivers that come with suse 9.1 and very little support for ati cards, will the card get damaged while using it without the drivers?

secondly...any suggestions on how to go about installing "latest" drivers for the ati 9600 on suse 9.1?

I seriously doubt any physical damage will occur from using a video card without a driver. The driver just enables most of the performance and features. Without a good driver, video performance will not be all that it could be, but you won't damage anything.

Even the most horribly written device driver can't hurt you ati card. A driver is only software, it can't hurt. The only way to do damage to your hardware is to overclock it. If you want to get better performance go to the ATI site you can download device drivers for linux for your card. The generic or framebuffer drivers might work but wont enable all the hardware acceleartion.