ATI Linux & X-Plane: It Works

When attempting to launch X-Plane 9, we were presented with an X-System Error that ATI hardware is not supported on Linux. This error message also recommended updating your graphics drivers, but we were already running the latest official driver. It wasn't mentioned in the error message, but if you pass the --force_run argument to the X-Plane binary, it will bypass this ATI error message.

While loading this flight simulator was the first sign that X-Plane is optimized for NVIDIA products.

When starting out with X-Plane 9 and the Catalyst 8.01 driver, everything had looked great. While the scenery on this beta isn't the best, we began to wonder what these "insurmountable problems" really were. This flight simulator was running fine with a Radeon HD 3870 and the Catalyst 8.01 package.