The AMDGPU driver was the first one where the "main" consumer driver was the FOSS one. Prior to this, "fglrx" was for many years the fully-featured, proprietary driver, intended for both professional purposes where certified OpenGL drivers are needed, and for consumers. The "radeon" open source drivers tended to lag behind in both hardware support, features, and performance. Initially, they were largely a community effort, but then AMD started publishing some GPU documentation, and then also put more of its own resources into developing the FOSS driver.
The UX of the "fglrx" drivers tended to be pretty awful, all told; typically worse than nvidia's proprietary drivers, so they were wildly unpopular among users. The performance gap eventually started closing, to the extent that some games/apps would be faster on the "radeon" drivers, and some on "fglrx".
Eventually, AMD switched to the AMDGPU model, where the kernel driver is always FOSS (and part of the upstream kernel), and there is the FOSS userland driver as part of Mesa for consumers, and a proprietary certified OpenGL driver for workstation users.
(I believe Valve also had a hand in this somewhere along the way - they were interested in shipping Steam Machines/SteamOS and understandably were keen on having a stable and fast graphics stack and so contributed to Mesa.)
>The UX of the "fglrx" drivers tended to be pretty awful, all told; typically worse than nvidia's proprietary drivers, so they were wildly unpopular among users.
This is my memory of the time. Both options being undesirable and proprietary but nvidia's at least working better.
The UX of the "fglrx" drivers tended to be pretty awful, all told; typically worse than nvidia's proprietary drivers, so they were wildly unpopular among users. The performance gap eventually started closing, to the extent that some games/apps would be faster on the "radeon" drivers, and some on "fglrx".
Eventually, AMD switched to the AMDGPU model, where the kernel driver is always FOSS (and part of the upstream kernel), and there is the FOSS userland driver as part of Mesa for consumers, and a proprietary certified OpenGL driver for workstation users.
(I believe Valve also had a hand in this somewhere along the way - they were interested in shipping Steam Machines/SteamOS and understandably were keen on having a stable and fast graphics stack and so contributed to Mesa.)