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i thought the fire gl team was one of the best driver teams in the world >>
The best, bar none IMHO.
That said, would you want to?
Yes.
The FireGL drivers are optimized for professional CAD/Modeling/Engineering applications not typical gaming uses.
In all likelyhood the FireGL driver team hasnt out much work into the DirectX side of the drivers at all, as DX is basically a non-entity in the professional level apps that FireGL cards typically see.
For the average home user I'd say it's possible the typical ATi drivers would be more suited and give better results then would the FireGL drivers. Undoubtedly the FireGL drivers would be a more reliable set however, but I wouldnt be terribly surprised if some games were rather iffy under the FireGL drivers.
As for whether you could use the ATi Radeon drivers with it, I'm inclined to say yes though I can't be certain as I've not had the opportunity to test any of the 8XXX FireGL boards. In terms of hardware capablilities the boards are near identical, it really comes down to specific board level differences in layout and DRAM capacities that they really differ between.
As ATi's current 8500' drivers already have to cope with a varied set of 8500' models with differing capabilities and design from third party manufacturers I'm inclined to believe it's highly likely they'd adapt easily to the FireGL board. >>
That's what I had believed, thanks. I want the FireGL 8800 because it has 128mb of 3.3ns DDR SGRAM, as well as VIVO.