Unfortunately, AMD and ATI before it have had driver quality issues for decades; and both they and their fans have claimed that they have solved the problems every year since.
Even if they have made progress, I doubt that they have reached parity with Nvidia. I have had enough false hope from them that I am convinced that the only way that they will ever improve their drivers if they let another group write the drivers for them.
Coincidentally, Valve has been developing the Vulkan driver used by SteamOS and other Linux distributions, which is how SteamOS is so much better than Windows. If AMD could get someone else to work on improving their GPGPU support, we would likely see it become quite good too. Until then, I have very low expectations.
As for being stuck in the past, I got fed up in 2006 after 8 years of nothing but ATI graphics. I spent years hoping that the issues would be fixed after the latest update, but they never were. I had a fairly problem free experience after switching to Nvidia. When issues did occur, Nvidia fixed them within months. While enjoying the relatively problem free experience on Nvidia, I would hear people claim everything was fixed on ATI (and later AMD), only to hear waves of people complaining about issues. Then Valve got involved with the driver development for AMD graphics and made the Steam deck. I brought one and it has been fantastic. I still hear about numerous problems involving drivers AMD wrote (especially their windows drivers), but I am using drivers that were in part authored by Valve, and Valve fixed the issues AMD was incapable of fixing themselves.
You claim that things are fine for HPC on AMD graphics hardware, but I have reason to be skeptical given that numerous people have reported severe problems just last year with no follow up that the various headaches have been fixed.
Also, you have repeatedly claimed that tinygrad’s software is not a driver, yet I see a userland driver here:
As I have said elsewhere: It loads various firmware blobs, manages part of the initialization process, manages memory, writes to registers, etcetera. These are all things a driver does.
I am going to listen to others and my own eyes over you on these matters.
