Good news is that AMD says they're going to open-source drivers for the ATI cards, so that might change dramatically:
http://enterpriselinuxlog.blogs.techtarget.com/2007/05/09/amd-will-deliver-open-graphics-drivers/

On 5/13/07, Billy Crook < billycrook@gmail.com> wrote:
My solution was to just stick to NVIDIA.  I had an ATI problem, but it
wasn't the same thing you have.  NVIDIA has much better linux support
than ATI.