Black Plague crash after menu, Overture and Requiem crash on start

[slayerboy]

OK after a little digging, I've disabled everything in the ATI Catalyst drivers, including Catalyst AI. I've dropped everything in Penumbra down to the lowest graphical settings. I can finally get through to the tutorial and into the game. The problem is there is a lot of missing textures in different places depending on where I move and how I move. I don't have time right now to investigate with settings, I'll try to do that when I get home from work in the morning. But I just wanted to update to say that I at least got it working, but not very pretty nor functional if I can't see things.

I'm just not understanding why I'm having these issues. This video card is still considered pretty darn good. In Windows I'd be able to run Crysis with no issues. Is the ATI Linux driver really that bad still?