Part 2

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This must be disabled in the kernel (this is kernel support for XFree's DRI-- Direct Rendering Interface-- the Direct Rendering Management). This is the single most important setting that must be disabled for the ATI drivers to work properly, and is probably the reason yours aren't.

So this has to go, too (but it will, as soon as you disable its parent setting):
Afaik, this is the DRM for the old Radeon series, not for the R350 chipset present on the 9700. I believe this works on Radeons up to the 9200 (which still used the R300 chipset, iirc), but that's no help to you. Turn it off.

I suspect this should be off as well (it was off on 2.6.7, where my bootsplash worked, but it is now on in 2.6.7-r7 where my bootsplash is not working, but it may be that 2.6.7-r7 doesn't include the bootsplash patch, since I can't enable bootsplash in the kernel anyway. Testing whether it should be off or on would require either an upgrade to 2.6.7-r8, or a recompile and reboot, so I'm not going to do that now. In any case, it only seems to affect the console frame buffer, rather than anything related to X, as that worked on both kernels with the different settings, so it's clearly a side issue):

Up to you whether you want to leave it (and risk needing to recompile the kernel again later to turn it off), or turn it off now (and risk needing to recompile the kernel to turn it back on, but I think that's a much less likely possibility).

Anyway, what you definitely need to do is turn off DRM-- I think that's all, it looks like you've enabled your motherboard's AGP support, assuming you have a VIA chipset board, if not, you should compile a module for the chipset you do have-- recompile the kernel, boot to the recompiled kernel, and reinstall the ATI drivers. This time they should load and run.

Let us know. Good luck, hope this helps.

Ok recompiling as we speak, I realy apreciate your help. I took Frame Buffer support off for the ATI, I think you are right I will most likely see my boot splash. DRM is off....

So Im sure things will be cooking after this I keep ya posted.

Ok, taking off Frame Buffer for ATI support only made my text a bit bigger during boot. (Just in case you were wondering)

Shutting off DRM in the kernel gave me a bit of a FPS gain in Americas Army. I am now in the 23 FPS range. A bit better but still not comparable to 40- 50 in windows.

I think we have explored all of our options motub, so I am going to roll back to 2.4.x kernel and use the older ATI drivers and see if I get any sort of gain with that. I have read that the newer versions of the ATI drivers are not that great.

Any other ideas let me no, Thanks for the good old collage try my friend.

40-50 fps in Windows? On a 9700? I'm not exactly certain that this isn't a problem with the game itself; that's just ridiculous, unless it's your hardware.

If you go back to older drivers, I'd suggest skipping 3.7.0-- they seemed like crap to me (and I've used 3.2.8, 3.7.0, 3.7.6, and now 3.9.0). I don't know much about driver internals, and don't really count fps, but if even I objectively thought they were junk in my relative ignorance, that seems to be worth taking into account. 3.7.6 were pretty good.

Anyway, a 130% improvement in the previous behaviour is quite good, so hopefully your further adjustments will bring the fps up to your requirements.

We're still around if you run into any other difficulties.