said by alamarco 
:said by Joe Blow :said by alamarco :My experience with older cards and the ATi fglrx have been good. Currently with my laptop and the Radeon Xpress 200M the drivers install painlessly and most options work in xorg.conf.
From the comments here, it seems the drivers are problematic with newer cards.
I have a HP Pavilion with a Turion and the 200M card. It's been very problematic. I tried for several iterations of ATI's drivers to try to get them to work and I'd get a black screen and the cpu would go into a race condition. It would lock up the system and overheat the cpu within a minute or so if I didn't hit the power button. Even after they
finally--it took them more than a year--got that problem fixed installing the drivers meant I couldn't get to a console. It took ATI more than two years to get their drivers to work from the time I first tried them. Once they at least worked they still consume approximately 3 times the cpu resources the open source drivers do when playing a video.
I've had the laptop 3 years and been playing with the drivers for that entire amount time and I still can't say ATI's drivers for the 200M are worth anything. They are more of a resource hog and won't work with Compiz. I just don't see how that's acceptable performance from a driver.
They do work with Compiz. When I tried Ubuntu they worked perfectly fine with no lag what so ever. The latest drivers even support AIGX (spelling) so there is no need for XGL (unless I'm mistaken).
The black screen bug had a solution, so even though ATi didn't fix it promptly I don't call this an important bug. Right now the drivers work near 100% for the Radeon Xpress 200M. The only problem, that which you have mentioned, is with going back to the console. It doesn't crash, as you can still type to startx again, but you can't see anything. If you use a login manager such as KDM or GDM it isn't even an issue as they will restart X themselves.
The 200M only works in 
