Or more precisely: not at all.

I wanted to find out what the performance difference between the opensource radeon drivers and the proprietary fglrx drivers from ATI is.

But it seems that the drivers from ATI do not support my former top-notch ATI mobile chipset I have...

ATI Technologies Inc Radeon RV200 LX [Mobility FireGL 7800 M7]

is the output of lspci, this is a IBM Thinkpad A31p (so a long-time top model of the Thinkpad series, with a great 1600x1200 display and 64 MB video ram)

The opensource driver works fine, with 3D acceleration. The proprietary driver returns the error message "[fglrx:firegl_init] *ERROR* Device not found!", from deep within the binary blob provided by ATI. No way for me to get that working. The docs at ATI suggest that they don't intend to support that video card.

I want opensource drivers (because they just work a lot better), so please stay away from me with that non-working proprietary stuff, and open up your software interfaces, please. Thank you.

And please stop requesting interfaces to load your binary stuff into the kernel... I doubt that there is any real trade secrets involved in the software interface... but maybe, as suggested before, "competing hardware manufacturers are violating each others patents so much that they cannot publish specifications of their hardware without showing which patents they are violating"?

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