No, so ATI had a pretty bad software group that was just limping along, somewhere around the 2xx series they admitted it and made a huge push to get a decent software team in. They were hiring hard and got some decent engineers, coupled with their really weak ones after, they started making good headroom, and over time (partly because they were forced to by the islands series) they slowly and painfully made better drivers.

They hired a new Sr. Director, before that they were given so much leeway, they had garbage like fglrx which crashed a lot and was closed source, but once they open sourced it got better fast, because they couldn’t live with spaghetti code.