The state of ATI rivers according to ARCH Linux

Recently, we had a discussion about the quality of ATI drivers vs NVIDIA. I
said some salesmen told me NVIDIA were better, but was answered that we
should encourage ATI because they at least provide some code.

Well, according to ARCH Linux developers, it seems that when it comes to
proprietary drivers ATI just doesn't compare to NVIDIA:


"Andreas Radke and I have talked about this and have come to a
conclusion. The ATI catalyst drivers are in a pitiful state and AMD is
doing close to nothing to improve the situation, they just take Linux as
a joke. At least, that is the impression one gets when nvidia releases
great drivers for Linux and ATI in the other hand is not showing any
promises in making their drivers better and well supported.

"In the other hand the radeonhd driver, which is in extra shows some
promise, and so far have been good, they have been able to make a good
driver with only some documentation released by AMD, when AMD can't make
one while being the makers, go figure out.

"This situation is worse in the x86_64 system, we have been stuck with
catalyst 8.12 while i686 has 9.2 already, because AMD just wanted to
break things at will, because their approach is very strange, break some
things to improve others.

<http://www.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2009-February/010394.html>

It seems to me that whatever code ATi-AMD provides is what could be found
fairly easily and that they're not much help otherwise.

Marcel Pagnol wrote:

(snip)

As if this wasn't enough, Novell has laid off one of the three RadeonHD
developer:

"Due to the tough economic conditions around the world, Novell last month
began slashing some of their workforce. With that reduction, a good
percentage of the paid OpenSuSE developers were laid off. As a major blow
to the development
of the open-source ATI graphics stack, one of the key RadeonHD driver
developers has been lost. The key xf86-video-radeonhd developers from the
start of this driver have been Luc Verhaegen, Matthias Hopf, and Egbert
Eich. Well, there are now just two key Novell developers left working on
the RadeonHD project.

"Luc Verhaegen has been let go from Novell. As was publicly announced this
morning in the form of a Git commit, Luc Verhaegen is no longer working for
Novell. While he was one of the few X developers working on OpenSuSE and
also responsible for the VIA Unichrome driver, Novell decide to eliminate
him. Due to limited access now to ATI hardware
, it's unlikely that we will see any future work from him in the RadeonHD
driver.

"Besides his coding, Luc also was critical to the organization and success
of the the X.Org development room at FOSDEM. With Luc no longer working for
OpenSuSE and possibly not even contributing to X.Org again, X@FOSDEM could
be in serious jeopardy.

"Best of luck to Luc Verhaegen and his future endeavors. The RadeonHD driver
is now at a loss."

<http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=NzEwNg>

I'm really afraid AMD has paid way too much for ATI, Now their cpu business
is dwindling and there no money left for driver development.

Tell me if I'm wrong.