[ Thanks to Michael
Larabel for this link. ]
“On the morning of April 12, 2006, Phoronix had delivered the
world’s first look at the Radeon X1000 series running under
GNU/Linux. That day ATI Technologies had finally delivered Radeon
X1000 product support for their fglrx display drivers. This support
had come six months after the launch of the Radeon X1k series back
in October of 2005. With the Windows Catalyst drivers having had
the support for months this lack of support had caused a great deal
of controversy in the GNU/Linux community. This support was also in
sharp contrast to NVIDIA’s same-day GNU/Linux support when the
GeForce 7800GTX 256MB was released. To make a long story short, the
driver support was finally there but the performance continued to
be below everybody’s expectations. In our ATI Radeon X1800 Linux
Preview we had seen the X1800XL 256MB barely possess any advantages
over the ATI X800XL, and in many of the benchmarks the X800XL had
even beat out the newer card…”