What is most recomended driver for ATI ?

[nekromancer]

I have a Toshiba Laptop that has a ATI Radeon HD 3470 Graphics card with 256MBMB.

I've struggled to get it working and right now it's running on ati-drivers-8.542 with xorg-server-1.3.0.0-r6 using kernel 2.6.27-gentoo-r8
I have the following problems.
1. Computer freezes when I shutdown X
2. Moving some windows around cause the pc to REALLY slow down. Ie) moving around xosview / audacious.

I recently saw this http://www.opendrivers.com/driver/248793/ati-radeon-hd-3400-hd-3450-hd-3470-driver-radeonhd-1.2-linux-free-download.html and noticed gentoo has this driver package. But I don't wanna mess with anything new.

What's the best driver for my card, do I stick with the ati-drivers or go with xf86-video-radeonhd or xf86-video-ati ?
Plus is there anywhere that shows how to install xorg-server 1.5+ so I can try to the new ati-drivers?

thanks

[scary]

Hi, I too have an hd3470 on a toshiba laptop (mine's an a300), and I settled with ati-drivers. Basically xf86-video-ati and radeonhd won't give you (yet) decent 3d performance nor power management, which I find to be a crucial feature on a laptop. So I'd stick for now with the closed source ati-drivers :(
Regarding slow moving windows, if you are running any desktop compositing (like compiz, xfce4 or kde4 compositing) then I believe this is a known problem, with no definitive solutions atm.
One thing that shouldn't happen however (doesn't happen for me) is the freezing on X shutdown. Are you running only stable packages ? You could try upgrading at least the ati-drivers package, and in any case look in /var/log/Xorg.0.log for error messages, in order to find if there's something wrong with your setup.

[nekromancer]

I'm running KDE 3.5.9 with no fancy compositing stuff on top.
I am technically running all stable packages... in relation to xorg server and kde. ati-drivers-8.542 is the only thing I unmasked because it's literally the only version that works with me.

If I try to install the newer ones, portage complains that I need xorg 1.5+ and that's masked. Not all programs have that "slowness" when moving the windows around. Only audacious and xosview (from what I use).

Running the glxgears program runs fine and smoothly. I think when I upgrade to xorg1.5 and use the newest ati-drivers.. everything should be ok.
Thanks for your input.