This one is a long, long time in coming and it is good it finally did. One huge criticism of ATI's cards over Nvidias cards in Linux has been, for a long time, the state of their driver packages. The official Radeon driver for Linux functioned, but was missing numerous features that Nvidia was offering and had huge issues with performance. Forget playing HD content on a laptop, for instance.
AMD wants to turn that around. Today they issued a press release announcing the launch of an overhauled Radeon driver for Linux. According to them, performance gains as high as 90% are seen in OpenGL titles. They are so pleased with their new driver, in fact, they have linked to a third party review of it.
The driver adds a host of other long-awaited features, such as AIGLX support. This gives me a good boost of hope for AMD's success in moving video cards, and anyone who is using a Radeon in Linux should give the new driver a try.