Thankfully.
However, the open source driver that is now part of the Linux kernel did indeed come from AMD, and could not have come from anywhere else.
Your parent said AMD publishes the sources to its (only) driver. That they happen to publish it with the Linux kernel wrapped around it, through kernel.org, is also true, but not incompatible with the claim that they publish it.
Open-source is great but is their driver remotely competitive in terms of actual usability/quality? As a desktop user I find ATI/AMD is still nowhere near the bar set by NVidia. I believe open-source generally results in better-quality software, but that hasn't actually come to fruition in the ATI/AMD drivers IME.
A resounding 'yes'. You must not be using their open source driver, or are using a very old one in your 'comparison' with nvidia's linux driver?
It is nice to have it work out of the box.
Quite a bit, I guess? I play a number of games, but no idea if they are "properly ported".
I do research into rendering algorithms and that sometimes involves straying from the trodden paths. This means that I always get sceptical when I need to use a feature that is a bit more obscure. With nVidia, I rarely encountered bugs in the driver.
I know for a fact that the Mesa software renderer sometimes lies about what it really supports amd does something different and completely inappropriate under the hood instead. A good example is that Mesa claimed to support floating point textures even if the support was not compiled to avoid patent licensing issues. Instead it would use 8 bit per channel internally, which totally broke some algorithms. I had to find out the hard way because the values I read back were suddenly horribly quantized.
What I want to say with these anecdotes is that "being able to render games so that they are playable" just shows that the driver quality is passable. A great driver needs to get a ton of additional things right that are not commonly used for games.
So much for open source driver.
Indeed. They raised the bar for Linux graphics. Maybe 10-20 years ago?
And then later ATI/AMD came along. And now their driver, the only driver, is open-source.
That is, they publish not only a driver, but more importantly the driver source. As is now true for pretty much all drivers for all HW Linux supports.
The bar has clearly been raised again. And now Nvidia is the only one lagging.
I don’t see anything unreasonable about asking them to contribute at the same level as everyone else.
Imagine how Linux would look today if all vendors got a free pass with doing things “their way” like Nvidia does. I doubt it would be functional at all.
I’m not going to cut Nvidia any slack today over what they did back in the days where everyone agreed M$ was evil and Google could do no wrong. It was a loooong time ago.