You're fooling yourself if you don't think they could've done better. There's no reason they had to start from scratch. Bridgman constantly stated the the free

You're fooling yourself if you don't think they could've done better. There's no reason they had to start from scratch. Bridgman constantly stated the the free drivers were intended for basic functionality and free software development purposes only, and that AMD would continue to provide proprietary drivers for people who needed performance. ATi started the free drivers in a last-ditch move of desperation to inflate sales in whatever small way possible when they were on the ropes. They'd hoped that this would get some of the *nix geeks to make significant buys. They only sponsored 2 developers if I remember right. I don't mean to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I don't think they really deserve all that much credit. Seven years is far too long to start skirting Windows performance parity, and please note that most newer hardware is still way behind. The open-source AMD drivers primarily remain of interest to people who want to develop free software or whose cards stopped working on the proprietary drivers. When I tried last September, you still couldn't reasonably play games with open-source radeon drivers on newish hardware.