Radeon versus Catalyst

[Tom Horsley]

Apparently the only way I can get audio out my HDMI port is
to use the closed source ATI catalyst drivers for my video
card (which I was able to get from rpmfusion).

When I tried switching to the catalyst driver, the video quality
was just appallingly awful. I found the moronic overscan control
and told it to set the overscan scale factor to zero, yet the
rendering was still dreadful. [Why ATI feels the need to protect
us from overscan which never existed on flat panel displays is
a separate question :-].

Characters on the screen appear to be surrounded by "interference
fringes" of some kind, it is almost impossible to read any
text. It is like it is still applying some not quite zero
scale factor to the screen image.

The same hardware using the open source radeon driver has
crisp clear letters that are rendered very nicely (once I
turned on auto hinting for everything, anyway).

Does anyone happen to know the magic voo-doo I must have
missed to get decent video from the catalyst drivers, or
am I doomed to using Windows 7 if I want both audio and
video at the same time :-).