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Since building a new computer with an ATI HD 5770 card last June, I've been making do without fairly basic support in Fedora 13 (and now 14). Although Phoronix posted in August last year that 2D and 3D acceleration support had landed in Mesa, it's taken a fair bit longer to be able to see this on Fedora, and it still requires a few steps.

Creating a "plusone" repository

sgordon wrote a very helpful guide in December on installing the latest drivers for Fedora, however his instructions point at the Fedora "rawhide" repository, which since February this year¹ has pointed to Fedora 16 (rather than the upcoming Fedora 15 release), meaning that there are several dependency problems when trying to update.

Instead, it's possible to create a repository definition for Fedora 15, disable it by default, and selectively install Fedora 15 packages on Fedora 14. Create a new file /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora-plusone.repo with the following content:

[plusone] name=Fedora 15 - $basearch failovermethod=priority mirrorlist=https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/metalink?repo=fedora-15&arch=$basearch enabled=0 metadata_expire=7d gpgcheck=0

Now you'll be able to add --enablerepo=plusone to any yum command.

Installing updated packages

Following sgordon's instructions,

yum update --enablerepo=plusone kernel libdrm mesa- xorg cairo pixman

After the installation is complete, reboot. You should now be able to enable "Desktop Effects", and enjoy (still-unfortunately-not-blazing-fast) graphics acceleration in games.

Caveats

As of writing this, there is a bug somewhere in the graphics stack, resulting in a black screen instead of GDM. To work around this, modify /boot/grub.conf (or edit the "boot" line in grub during startup) or to remove rhgb .