I've had a Sapphire ATI X1950 Pro video card for over 30 days now, and it's crossed my mind more than once to send it back to Newegg and get an nVidia replacement.

Well, it’s been a while—“cough!”—the set’s all dusty since my previous post about 3D cards...One thing that isn’t quite dusty though, is the state of free software drivers! I will sum up the different evolutions (some would even say, revolutions) that have occurred over this summer (June-September 2007).

The open-source Avivo driver is currently bound to supporting the ATI R500 GPU family and with efforts now being focused on the RadeonHD driver, this reverse-engineered driver will likely never support the newer GPUs (The Death Of The R500 Avivo Driver). However, the RadeonHD driver that was pushed out into the public a few hours ago does support the R600 series.

AMD started delivering on their word of providing GPU specifications to the open-source community without a Non-Disclosure Agreement, and now with the 2007 X Developer Summit having come to a close, we asked several key members of the X.Org community on how they judge AMD's recent move.

This past week AMD raised the Linux graphics bar but the ball has now landed in NVIDIA's court. NVIDIA can either play ball by pushing forward with a similar effort, and then all of the big three GPU manufacturers would be cradling an open-source strategy, or they may find themselves in trouble down the road.

AMD announced on Sept 7 a major strategic change in open-source graphic processors support. It announced it would provide open-source information and a development package supporting the ATI RadeonHD 2000 series ATI Radeon X1000 series of graphics processing units on Linux desktops.

AMD just announced that its upcoming Catalyst 7.9 drivers for Linux will not only finally provide support to HD 2000 series on the OS, but it is also claimed to host the most significant series of enhancements ever for Linux users. As far as AMD graphics drivers are concerned, that is.

While ATI/AMD claim that they provide enough support for developing open source ATI Radeon drivers, developers of open source drivers tell a much different story. Very few of them have specifications, and those are stripped down and a lot of needed information is missing from them so they have to use time-consuming error-prone reverse engineering.