Do you have an actual argument here? The story, while interesting, doesn't really contribute either way. Per the author's own story the switch to the new driver broadly didn't happen until after it was finally stable, and the legacy driver continued to receive performance optimizations in the meantime.
It's an interesting story of project management nightmares, but it doesn't provide any argument to the state of AMD's drivers as experienced by end users either way.
In terms of stability we do have some large-scale metrics on that front, such as Vista's crash blaming. Those metrics don't support claims that AMD's drivers are less stable than Nvidia's, as the Nvidia was responsible for 28.8% of Vista crashes while ATI was 9.3%. Given more Nvidia than ATI users that's not necessarily damning, but it also clearly disagrees with the notion that ATI is deeply unstable while Nvidia is rock solid.
And keep in mind during the 9700 Pro's prime all the way up to today OpenGL is used by nearly nothing on Windows. We're already talking about the niche use case.
The ATI dev on twitter made no such claim. In fact he never made any claim about stability at all. Just that the new driver was missing functionality, so only specific things (like Doom3) got it and they were shipping 2 OpenGL drivers as a result during 2004-2007. End-users weren't broken during that timeframe. The old driver didn't suddenly break and get super unstable. If anything the complaint is that the old driver was too stable, it wasn't getting new features & changes fast enough.
It's an interesting story of project management nightmares, but it doesn't provide any argument to the state of AMD's drivers as experienced by end users either way.
In terms of stability we do have some large-scale metrics on that front, such as Vista's crash blaming. Those metrics don't support claims that AMD's drivers are less stable than Nvidia's, as the Nvidia was responsible for 28.8% of Vista crashes while ATI was 9.3%. Given more Nvidia than ATI users that's not necessarily damning, but it also clearly disagrees with the notion that ATI is deeply unstable while Nvidia is rock solid.
And keep in mind during the 9700 Pro's prime all the way up to today OpenGL is used by nearly nothing on Windows. We're already talking about the niche use case.