I’ve had my ups and downs with the two Radeon cards that I’ve used. One, a 9500 Pro AGP 128MB, has the R300 chipset, which has “experimental” support. The other (in my machine now) is a Radeon 9550 AGP 256MB and it runs on the RV350 chipset. There is excellent support for the R200 and below and there is great support (soon to get better thanks to the opening of the specs - thanks ATI). However, anything above a 9250 and below the 9800 doesn’t have great support via x.org or even the proprietary Linux driver that ATI provides.
Ubuntu has been doing well at getting around this. I hadn’t really experienced much in the way of trouble with the cards until the release of Feisty Fawn (which got corrected as it approached “final” release) and after Gutsy Gibbon (7.10), which I installed to see where its at. I’m back to the hard locks, which don’t seem to have any specific type of trigger at all with the free x.org driver and seem to occur when I try anything 3-D, with the proprietary driver, which sucks, because I wanted to try playing “America’s Army” and the Western mod for Quake 3 (on OpenArena).
Oh well. Ironic post after the last flurry of comments, I am sure.
Hari’s Corner » Blog perambulations - second edition says:
[...] Thompson writes about his experiences with ATI video cards on Linux in his article ATI Cards on Ubuntu (or any other Linux). ATI have always lagged behind NVIDIA in driver support, but recent developments suggest that the [...]