About a month ago I picked up the ATI 3850 video card thinking it would be significant performance upgrade from my Nvidia 7950GT – it was. However, I was seriously dismayed to see the state of video drivers from ATI – in particular in comparison to the Nvidia driver.

Anyhow, so I started the fight. The fight to get my ATI 3850 card to drive my Viewsonic VG2230wm at 1680×1050@60. I tried several of the binary ATI drivers but finally got the 8.01 (the kernel version is 8.45.4, the driver is labeled 8.01 and the ATI website says it’s version 8.1 !? -man is that confusing) driver to work. Simple to install; Download the binary, then from a command line just execute the file as root.

Here is my relevant xorg.conf sections:

Section "Module"

        Load            "GLcore"

        Load            "glx"

        Load            "dbe"

        Load            "v4l"

EndSection

Section "Device"

        Identifier      "ATI3850"

        Busid           "PCI:1:0:0"

        Driver          "fglrx"

EndSection 

Section "Monitor"

        Identifier   "Monitor"

        VendorName   "ViewSonic"

        ModelName    "VG2230wm"

        DisplaySize  470 300

        HorizSync    24.0 - 84.0

        VertRefresh  50.0 - 85.0

        ModeLine     "1680x1050@60" 154.20 1680 1712 2296 2328 1050 1071 1081 1103 +hsync +vsync

        Option       "dpms"

EndSection 

Enjoy!