lost_soul on 26/8/2010 at 23:47
Yeah, they've been doing that for a couple of years now. If you're happy with Quake3-era games, the open source drivers will usually work. I used them on a X1600XT to play and it was flawless. However, they don't work well on modern games, like Quake 4, The Dark Mod, or (probably) Penumbra.
There is a similar effort for NVIDIA cards, but they are reverse-engineering the proprietary drivers to create a free alternative. "Nuvo" I believe it is called... Never tried it.
