New OpenGL driver for ATI cards from AMD this year

Phil Rogers was recently interviewed by extremetech.com about the ATI drivers. While the interview focuses mainly on Windows there are some information about Linux as well.

In the 5-page long interview Rogers mentions Linux while he talks about a totally reworked OpenGL driver: the driver was rewritten from the scratch in the last three years and is developed for Windows XP, Vista and Linux. While (of course…) the Vista driver has the main priority the Xp and the Linux driver will be shipped later this year.

Besides the Linux driver itself Rogers mentions also a new Catalyst Control Center:

On the Linux front we will also be releasing a new version of the Catalyst Control Center quite soon.

Sounds great - however, I wonder when we will see the first results of this new drivers. And I wonder what this new driver has to do with the AMD announcement to fix certain issues of the current driver regarding to Open Source. Remember: the fglrx driver does not support AIGLX or has its own implementation (like Nvidia has), not to mention stuff like RandR 1.2.

Last but not least, I wonder which OpenGL version will be supported by this new driver - it is planned to release a new OpenGL API version 3.0 this year (!) and it would be nice to see ATI being fast to adopt it.