[ Thanks to Michael for this link.
]
“Back in April of 2006, a proprietary driver from ATI that had
supported the Radeon X1000 ‘R500’ product family had finally
greeted Linux users. This driver, v8.24.8, had supported the entire
desktop and mobile Radeon X1000 lineup with 3D support and even
Avivo video playback capabilities. For the six months prior, Linux
users were stuck in the dark without any Linux support for the R500
series while the ATI Windows Catalyst customers had support that
was continually improved. Of course, back in 2006 there was no
open-source R500 driver either. Over the past 16 months with R500
support in the fglrx driver, the features have continually improved
with an AMD Catalyst Control Center for Linux, support for the
newer R500 graphics cards, and there are far less bugs in the
driver now then there was in the past. However, these changes
really have not affected the performance as it has stayed the same
for the most part with minimal improvements. In this article today
we are going back to test the original 8.24.8 display driver and
compare it directly against the latest driver available as of
today, the 8.40.4 fglrx release…”