Jerome Glisse announced today that a small team of X.Org developers has managed to provide the initial support for ATI R500-based cards (ATI Radeon X1300 up to X1600 at the time) by reverse engineering. The released code is definitely not yet ready for the normal users, but it's the big step ahead nevertheless. Especially having in mind how ATI (now owned by AMD) has not provided specifications of their hardware to the open source community.
Linux Reviews, News and HowTo Guides