unixhero parent
It has been going on for 23 years. My rage128 card, which I bought as a youngster, in 2000, had the worst drivers that 80% of the time did not work.
I don't know if that's a fair comparison... AMD might have bought ATI, but they're not exactly the same company anymore...
Plus back then the concept of needing drivers for hardware was rather new... prior to SVGA, DOS games talked to the hardware directly or just dumped data into a chunk of memory for the video card to display.