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ATI has become a subsidiary of AMD, and their quality has dropped accordingly...

Unless you care about open source graphics in which case ati/amd has never been this good. And vulcan support is likely to be even better than opengl.
https://mesamatrix.net/
Meanwhile Nvidia makes running open source drivers harder.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nouveau-XDC2017

Yup, there used to be, a long time ago, a period where basically you had closed-source FGLRX which was feature complete, but extremely buggy and crash-prone. And the then-recently started various opensource source drivers efforts (some by AMD opensource devs, other completely reverse engineered by 3rd party devs...) which were lacking lots of feature, though a lot more stable than the blobs.

That was about a decade ago.

In 2017, the official driver according to AMD *is* the opensource driver, it's feature complete (full support up to GL 4.5 and GLES 3.1, 4.6 should be ready soonish), maintained upstream (in vanilla kernel and mesa3d) by paid developpers including on AMD's payroll.
It's fucking stable.
(In my opinion, best experience with a rolling-release distro like openSUSE Tumbleweed - which has an up-to-date kernel/Mesa3d/LLVM and GPU drivers devs on their payroll)

Meanwhile, Nvidia are still problematic with laptops (mainly due to not playing nice with the linux API to handle weird stuff like optimus, etc.) sometime very broken (due to insisting on using user-mode-setting, on my laptop it's just plain broken whenever the laptops goes into/resumes sleep).
I personally have to resort to nouveau, which is great piece of work (given the way it was developed through reverse engineering only) but needs to constantly play catch-up and will always be lagging feature-wise.
(At least with my rolling distro, I'm getting fixes not long after they are written by the devs).

I am several days late because I have been playing Tomb Raider on my Linux machine.

Yup, I feel your pain. It was an anxious wait until RadeonSI hit the opengl 4.2~4.3 milestone in Mesa.

(To all the other regular /. readers: sorry for the deep insider joke).

Just curious, which 80% is that ? The open drivers are currently at GL 4.1 with a lot of the 4.2-4.5 features already implemented. Looking at the list of unsupported extensions very few of them seem to be hardware related - I could agree with maybe a few % of the hardware being supported but not 80%.

https://mesamatrix.net/

The Boltzmann (aka ROC/HSA) stack also uses the open source drivers, and that covers a lot of HW functionality even Windows drivers don't support.

I can only agree. I have and AMD card and the company dropped driver support for my card, a Radeon 4870, in 2012. The card is still able to play most games, it was a really good card when I bought it. Was really p*ssed off, when AMD dropped the support. For me, Mesa improvements were awesome. In 2012, Mesa/Gallium was a lot slower and had a lot less features. Personally, I saw the most improvements in 2014, speedwise. But 2015 wasn't bad either. When Witcher 2 was released early this year/last year(don't remember) it didn't work at all with stable Mesa drivers, but it worked with drivers from the trunk. When Civ5 BE was released, the game didn't work at all. Couple of weeks later, it worked somewhat and I just tried it, it seems to work flawlessly. Sure, there are still lots of problems, e.g. Divinity OS EE was released (finally) a few days ago. Doesn't work. It seems, the game needs an OpenGL 4.2 function which is still not implemented on Radeon. But chances are good, that it will be implemented in the next couple of weeks, it's only one of two missing extensions to become 4.2 compliant. http://mesamatrix.net/

ES 3.1 is current, you don't go higher than that for the time being. OpenGL 4.1 has "full compatibility with OpenGL ES 3.0 APIs", which I interpret as "strict superset", and 4.3 has the same relationship with ES 3.1. Additionally, a shim is available to provide.

Wikipedia covers this here and here. Keep abreast of how Mesa is coming along here.

Or just keep reading those Phoronix articles.

Also mesa matrix for checking opengl levels
http://mesamatrix.net/

Yes, it's encouraging how much mesa work is already done even for OGL 4.5. Remember when mesa was stuck for years at 2.1 plus extensons? A very nice 2.1, but preventing serious use for a lot of modern rendering techniques.

At one time, mesa was pretty much a one man project, now there is obviously some serious funding behind it.

Also mesa matrix for checking opengl levels
http://mesamatrix.net/

Go look at the Mesa Matrix http://www.mesamatrix.net/ Nouveau supports more OpenGL features on their open source cards than AMD does.

Both Nvidia and AMD recent drivers (r600 and radeonsi) are 100% green on all OpenGL features that are currently officially supported (OpenGL 3.x)
They only have red spots for feature that are for OpenGL versions that aren't supported by mesa yet any way (OpenGL 4.x) - in other words, that's still getting worked on. And given the current pace of development, both cards will support all opengl 4.x feature with short time difference between each other.

(Note: the case of r300 is a bit different. It's an older card generation (The various Radeon 9600/9800/X) and actually lacks some features like unified shaders - unlike the nv50/nvc0/r600/radeonsi cards. So you'll never see 100% features support anyway. The hardware simply isn't there)

The problem aren't *features*. The problem is performance.

The only thing that's been holding the Nouveau cards back has been power management and even that's not a huge issue,

Except for the part that re-clocking is critical to get decent performance out of a card. And it doesn't work reliably yet. The usability is, according to current benchmark at phoronix, quite random.

That's not nouveau team's fault, though. Nvidia has started releasing documentation only very recently (and almost only about Tegra).
Without documentation Nouveau team has to reverse engineer almost everything, and that's not an easy task as shown by the actual realworld performance.

Nouveau has been also very rapid at making all features available to the newest generation of cards very quickly.

Except that real world test tend to show that the actual result will vary greatly between differnt cards.

I expect that by this time next year, they will have working OpenGL 4.2-4.3 support,

And probably the other drivers will have it too around the same time frame...
(You know, the whole point of Gallium being modular and parts being re-usable. Once Mesa starts supporting a feature for one card, getting the other to support is a lot easier: basically only upgrading the backend)

Whether Nvidia has posted meaningful contributions to the project or not is almost irrelevant. The reality is that open source Nvidia is coming and it's going to be great.

It *IS* relevant. Without any help from Nvidia, the work for Nouveau developer is much harder (as seen with the current problems regard re-clocking), and more bumpy accross the landscape of varied graphic cards.

As AMD provides documentations to the radeonsi/r600 developers (in addition to having some developer on their own payroll), it's much easy for them.
To the point that AMD considers the opensource driver as a valid alternative for older hardware whose support has been dropped in recent catalysts.

It's all irrelevant anyway, AMDs Open Source support sucks, and hasn't been stable. Nouveau's Open Source support is actually better. Go look at the Mesa Matrix http://www.mesamatrix.net/ Nouveau supports more OpenGL features on their open source cards than AMD does. The only thing that's been holding the Nouveau cards back has been power management and even that's not a huge issue, http://nouveau.freedesktop.org... notice that power management is almost complete on all current gen cards going right back to the Geforce 3/4 series! (admittedly Geforce 3/4 has stalled in part, but the other cards are all close to completion) So the legacy support level is fantastic as is the current card support. Nouveau has been also very rapid at making all features available to the newest generation of cards very quickly. I expect that by this time next year, they will have working OpenGL 4.2-4.3 support, and power management will be completed. Whether Nvidia has posted meaningful contributions to the project or not is almost irrelevant. The reality is that open source Nvidia is coming and it's going to be great.