AMD recently announced new drivers for Linux and also unveiled some of its plans to open its drivers to the community. With this move the company will certainly earn some favors in the open source community but that is not all. Later this month we will be able to get our hands on the new Catalyst 7.9, which will add Linux support for the ATI Radeon HD 2000 together with “major performance improvements across the board” that will have as a result a “90 per cent improvement in such popular titles as Doom 3 and Quake 4″, according to AMD.

The company seems to really want to go open source with their drivers and it seems like AMD will get together with the open source community to create a 2D and 3D driver that can support the newest Radeon chipsets. What is surprising is that documentation will also be released so that anyone can create drivers from scratch. 2D documentation will come first with 3D some time after. A lot of people are talking and it will be interesting to see what happens.