Daniel Stone, a Ubuntu X.org hacker, just added the last details of what the AMD is planning regarding the graphics drivers, which makes up the following roadmap:

• specifications without NDA
• 2D as well as 3D
• new closed source OpenGL drivers with speed on par with Nvidia
• AIGLX support in one month

now thats more than we might have even dreamed of. Especially the open specs part is great and goes much further than what intel has to offer. Now we will be able to use our graphics hardware the way we want to - without the limits imposed by closed source drivers. Imagine running Gimp on your Shader3 capable Graphics card using LLVM i.e. using it as a hyper fast vector coprocessor for general computing - fully automated through a modified gcc.

But the increased effort on the binary only driver is good news too, since its the best way to support patented techniques like S3TC or HDMI.