After switching to the nearby O'Hare International Airport, we then found the first (and apparently the only) ATI problem: the water shaders are horrible. However, it turns out that this poorly rendered water is common to the ATI Windows driver too when running X-Plane.

For comparison, we had also tested X-Plane 9.00 Beta 18 with a NVIDIA GeForce 8600GTS and the 169.09 Linux driver. When using the NVIDIA hardware and driver, the water was less polluted.

After a few hours of testing X-Plane 9.00 Beta 18 with ATI Linux, the only real problem we had experienced was with the water. Was this just FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, & Doubt) being spread by Laminar Research about ATI being an "unusable disaster"? Well, it turns out that they just didn't follow their own error message by updating the ATI/AMD graphics driver. The ATI Linux driver they were using was back from 2006 and still very much on ATI's old OpenGL driver (read: they should've been subscribing to the Phoronix RSS).

Ben Supnik has now edited an ATI Linux thread on the X-Plane Forums stating that it "pretty much just works" when using the latest ATI Linux drivers (Catalyst 7.11 or later). In the X-Plane 9.00 Beta 20 release, the ATI error message when attempting to start the game will be removed. The temporary workaround for the water issue is to run X-Plane with the --no_fbos argument.

Share your thoughts on X-Plane 9 for Linux in the Phoronix Forums.