"Over the last year, ATI has shocked observers by not only taking the video card performance crown from nVidia, but also keeping it. This trend appears bound to continue for the foreseeable future with the recently released Radeon 9800 that has taken much of the spotlight away from nVidia's card intended to surpass the 9700.
"With that reputation and ATI's recent offering of its first proprietary GNU/Linux drivers, we were interested to see if a follow-up driver was in store to provide compatibility with XFree86 4.3, which was released earlier this year. To an extent, ATI's outreach to the Free Software community has already provided support to 4.3, with full support for the Radeon 9700's 2D capabilities already supported in the XFree86 Project's release.
"However, 3D acceleration, and by extension, accelerated OpenGL support, has not yet been forthcoming for the newest iteration of XFree included in Mandrake Linux 9.1, Red Hat Linux 9 and SuSE Linux 8.2. To find out what ATI was planning, we contact the Ontario-based company and had a conversation with their Manager of Developer Relations, Michael Smith..."
