I've a few Radeon cards that do somewhat the same thing. One will occasionally change the colour palette between reboots, but not on clean starts. Another is in a Thinkpad as well, though its an r60. That one always boots nearly invisible if the driver is enabled, though if the system is configured for X, once it starts the palette shifts to a normal one.
You may have to decide if you want a legible console, or accelerated X and then either disable the driver in the kernel, or on boot with boot.conf, or do it at least once to set up X and keep up a boot menu option to disable it in case X ever has issues.
