What are these F-10 boot slides?

[Timothy Murphy]

John Brier wrote:

>> What do the 3 growing horizontal slides
>> at the bottom of the F-10 boot screen represent?
>> 
>> They are rather ugly, I think, as are the whole boot graphics.
>> Looks like some child was let in the room during development.

> Wait til you see the new Plymouth at its best. You have to append
> vga=0x318 to kernel line in grub.conf for 1024x768 graphical boot.
> Otherwise you get the text boot mode which you are seeing. This is all
> explained in the release notes:
> 
> http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f10/en_US/
> What_is_New_for_Installation_and_Live_Images.html#sn-Fedora_10_boot-time

> =========

> The graphical boot splash screen that comes with Plymouth requires
> kernel mode setting drivers to work best. There are not kernel
> modesetting drivers available for all hardware yet. To see the
> graphical splash before the drivers are generally available, add
> vga=0x318 to the kernel grub command line. This uses vesafb, which
> does not necessarily give the native resolution for a flat panel, and
> may cause flickering or other weird interactions with X. Without
> kernel modesetting drivers or vga=0x318, Plymouth uses a text-based
> plugin that is plain but functional.
> ==============

I did actually read that, but didn't understand it.

In the same section, I found the sentence
"Currently, only Radeon R500 and higher users 
get kernel modesetting by default"
particularly puzzling.

Does this really mean that "plymouth" only works properly
with this particular kind of ATI card?

Strange ...