I don't even think that is the problem. It seems more an engineering cultural one, that has sadly infected most of the software industry at this point. Instead of incremental improvement it seems the old ATI drivers (and seemingly much of the recent history) are just rewrites rather than having a replaceable low level core and a reasonable amount of legacy that just gets forward ported to newer HW architectures. So, they release the hardware and its basically obsolete before the driver stack ever stabilizes sufficiently that any single driver can run a wide range of games well.
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I don't even think that is the problem. It seems more an engineering cultural one, that has sadly infected most of the software industry at this point. Instead of incremental improvement it seems the old ATI drivers (and seemingly much of the recent history) are just rewrites rather than having a replaceable low level core and a reasonable amount of legacy that just gets forward ported to newer HW architectures. So, they release the hardware and its basically obsolete before the driver stack ever stabilizes sufficiently that any single driver can run a wide range of games well.