ATI drivers only load in failsafe terminal

I've been trying to get the ATI drivers to work with gnome.
At the moment when gnome starts up it uses the mesa drivers which don't seem to work too well for watching videos or playing games with my current setup.
I can however get the ATI drivers to load if I start X manually with xinit or by going into failsafe terminal from GDM and videos and games work fine from there but it's a bit of a hassle.
So the problem is not with the drivers more with gnome/kde4.
I tried using kde4 also and it switches to the mesa driver.

Anyone know what I need to do to get gnome to use the ati drivers?