ATI Hardware: A Final Verdict
 

So there are, at any given moment, about a half a dozen threads running about ATI cards and their respective problems under pretty much ever distro out there. I know, because I read all of them and posted in several. This all seems to be rather cumbersome on the forum, and nobody has answered the greatest question out there...

It's clear that playing recent games under ATI proprietary is hopeless gaming suicide. Compliance with some games (UT2004, AA) is only achieved after tweaking modprobe.conf and rc.modules, or sometimes even kernel recompiliation. What's more, ATI has gone through several versions and improvement has been marginal at best (at worst, regressive).

What's even more disturbing is the recent release of Doom 3 is, as far as I've heard, almost completely incompatible with ATI cards (those who do get it running have serious artifact bugs). The incompatibility isn't the mind-boggling part though: it's that ATI hasn't made any press releases or announcements about upcoming drivers that they didn't already make a year ago.

This is disgusting and I need to ask this community: is this hardware vendor worth sticking with or should I just give up and spend more money and buy an nvidia card? I am hesitant to since I don't have a lot of money and my movement to open-source software was fueled by the intention of NOT getting caught up in corporate greed.

Just buy an Nvidia card. If your going to use ATI drivers, I suggest (literaly) Red Hat 9, since they support the comercial versions of linux. (I had 100% no problem with Red Hat 9 and my 9600. 3.7.6 drivers and up)

wine doesn't work at all with my ATI drivers so I haven't been able to try native-windows applications yet. I am not in any hurry to pay for software (Cadega or WineX) that probably won't work either.

But... it is worth a thought