14 DAY TRIAL // The AMD Foss Drivers have just received an important update and it looks like they are now OpenGL 4.1 compliant, which means that some new cool features are on their way.
There is no doubt that the drivers for video cards are one of the biggest problems for Linux systems, and they are mainly the ones to blame for poor performance. It's true that it's not only the responsibility of AMD or Nvidia to make sure that games work properly on Linux systems, but they have a big responsibility.
Nvidia has been doing a better job at providing up-to-date drivers than AMD, but since this is Linux, it means that people actually have a choice, and they are not forced to use the proprietary drivers provided by these companies. There are also open source drivers available out there, and they are decent, for the most part.
As you can expect, the developers for these drivers don't have access to all the insides of the GPUs, so they can't hope to match features and performance, but they do a pretty good job either way. They also have some help from AMD and Nvidia teams, which is a nice thing altogether.
Open source drivers are now OpenGL 4.1 compliant
So, what does this mean? For the most part, the better the support for new versions of OpenGL, the better the support for games that require this version of OpenGL. Some of the newer titles rely on advanced technologies, and they can only be enabled with new versions of OpenGL.
The fact that the AMD FOSS drivers now offer support for OpenGL 4.1 is a big step forward, and it gives users access to a feature in games called tessellation. This is only possible for AMD Radeon 5000 series and up, so don't get all excited. It will also take some time for the changes to propagate through the drivers and the repositories out there.