This article contains some notes about the latest 7-12 ATI linux drivers. Biggest change in versions after 8.40 (aside of the new versioning scheme), is the support for Composite and AIGLX extensions, and the supposedly improved 3D performance. Unfortunately for some, support is currently limited to newer Radeon cards only.
Installation on my X700 was not entirely straight-forward, though.

Installation took place on my laptop which has a X700 on-board, but the driver only worked properly after some tweaking of xorg.conf...

Since I'm using Gentoo, installation of the latest driver was fairly   ...