You had a problem with ATI's closed-source driver 14 years ago. AMD's open-source driver now is a COMPLETELY different story.
Indeed. In 2003 no-one would have based their expectations on what happened in 1989. 14 years is an eternity in this field.
Also GOOD NEWS ATI is dead, it wasn't AMD that manufactured the Card or the Drivers! It was a company called ATI based in Canada. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATI_Technologies
AMD bought them 2006 and killed ATI brand 3 years later. Also I bet you only a handful of people actually still work on the technology.
Read the offical documentation on Linux with SUSE and NVIDIA.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_display_ia32_1.0-4363.htm...
Linux in 2003 is a totally different beast today. Tell me you got your wifi working or NVIDIA with a working desktop out of the box. I would sit in the terminal and have to install proprietary drivers just to see Gnome or KDE. I would have to sit by the Ethernet port for a while till I got wifi working.
Read this forum post I can post hundreds of these because I read them all trying to get my card to work. I had to edit my X11 configs by hand till around 2008???
https://www.opengl.org/discussion_boards/showthread.php/1575...