From Rage3d:
http://www.rage3d.com/board/showpost...&postcount=479

Matthew Tippett works on ATI's Linux Team and he says:
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Okay.

So we now have an official release date - it will come out with the posted next monday - the 17th January.

Once again, the development teams and web teams have procedures that we must go through. This unfortunately creates a delay between completion and posting, Christmas didn't help. Since our projected post date (mid January) ended up being right beside some other ati.com work - the two have been folded intogether.

Informing the web team to 'post the drivers now' doesn't serve to accelerate the process.

So next Monday is the day!
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This driver is supposed to support xorg 6.8.X and have something like a 5% performance boost from what I've read there.

Sweet. I'll be looking forward to Monday! And will this support transparency/shadows and all that fun stuff?

I think all the "fun stuff" you're referring to is in x.org 6.8.X - And the new ATI driver is supposed to support the new X.ORG, so....

Even though I'm kinda anxious for this new driver, I plan on waiting a few days to see what the general user experience is with it before upgrading.

Hey well the new drivers are here and I've successfully installed them. They work just great, and I now have hardware accelerated graphics for the first time ever on Linux. It feels spooky!

Wait till you try to play a game.. and down goes the performance.. heck, it wont even run diablo 2 properly =(

new drivers seem to work well for me... but it's only a mobility 9600 laptop chip, so as you can imagine I don't do a whole lot of gaming. But I was excited at the prospect of finally upgrading to X.org 6.8.1... finally... ATI makes great cards... but their driver people have their thumb permanently up their ass... always been that way, that's why I like nvidia cards so much more. Sure ATI cards may be like 5-10 frames faster (not that the human eye can notice that anyways) but at least nvidia has always had rock solid drivers