ATI: 2. Ben: 0.

What a difference new drivers make. ATI's latest OpenGL drivers (Catalyst 8.1) seem to work quite well with X-Plane. On two fronts:

• Linux. Turns out all you need to do to make X-Plane happy on Linux with ATI hardware is update the drivers. I'm running with the Cat 8.1 drivers on my MacBook Pro and things look good. Use Catalyst 7.11 drivers or newer! No more MALLOC_CHECK_=1 or --no_threaded_ogl. With the next beta, you won't have to use --force_run anymre.
• Windows. We were getting reports of corrupt screens on startup, and with the Catalyst 8.1 drivers these reports became very frequent. Turns out our threaded OpenGL code was doing something naughty*. Beta 19 fixes this.

The only known issue I can think of is: if you see corrupt water reflections, run with --no_fbos.

* Well, the way you set up threaded OpenGL on Windows and Linux is not very well documented, so I say naughty in that we made the drivers unhappy. I have yet to find a document that states clearly whether what we were doing is correct or not. We had to guess.