Graf Zahl wrote:deprecate their older hardware far, far quicker
More accurately, nvidia maintains legacy drivers far, far longer. Both AMD and nVidia currently only support their 2010+ (aka Direct X 11) cards. nVidia however, maintains two generations of legacy drivers.
I do assume you're referring to the HD4000 series fiasco where they were still selling HD4000 hardware (albeit in integrated form) when driver support was dropped? AMD was forced into maintaining a legacy driver then, not sure if said legacy driver is still being updated though.
MetroidJunkie wrote:So it isn't that the cards are less capable with OpenGL so much as the company that made them in the first place is bad when it comes to any real driver support. Sounds like this is a problem that could be fixed with community efforts. After all, custom drivers are made all the time for GPU's when it comes to Linux distros. Could they, in theory, run OpenGL just as well as any Nvidia equivalent if they had genuinely good drivers?
I wouldn't count on the community writing good graphics drivers. They're still only OpenGL 3 compliant and if I'm not mistaken most of the work being done on the open source drivers are done by Intel and AMD. (Intel doesn't have a closed source Linux driver and AMD plans on maintaining both with some shared code.) On top of that for AMD vs Catalyst there's a pretty significant performance drop (although the open source drivers are still generally useful if you're not doing heavy gaming).