ATI's Radeon Linux drivers no longer supported?

SuperBug writes "After viewing the previous story on Slashdot about the Radeon 9800 vs GF FX 5900, I checked out ATI's web-site which seems to have been re-designed relatively recently. It seems strikingly similar to nVidia's site regarding the driver selections. I thought "great, ths should be much better to find my drivers now. At least a little simpler." To my surprise. I found this message for Linux Graphics Drivers "Not Supported". Thinking this had to be a mistake, I took a look at the "Discontinued Products" list under the customer care link and lo and behold. Just about every recent card is there. I just wanna know, what gives?"

Comments

Radeon Mobility performance under DRI is awful.

[Netsnipe]

Section "Device"
Identifier "ATI Technologies, Inc. Radeon Mobility M6 [LY]"
Driver "radeon"
Option "AGPMode" "4"
Option "AGPFastWrite"
Option "EnablePageFlip"
EndSection

With the above settings under XFree86 4.3.0-0ds4 (Debian), the 16MB SDRAM card on my IBM Thinkpad R40 Celeron R40 + 256MB RAM can pull a maximum of 260 fps in glxgears.

Does anyone else think this is just woeful performance? I haven't been able to get those stupid ATI binary modules to load either, so ATI better get off their arses and give the DRI project a hand or play catch up to Nvidia with their closed Linux driver support. If I can't squeeze anymore performance out of my ATI soon, I'll be voting for Nvidia with my wallet for my next desktop upgrade.