Quote Originally Posted by bridgman View Post
More like 3-4 years for a new generation. We're already hooked into future GPU development work so the delay from intro to open source driver support should be shorter than for previous generations when we were mostly playing "catch-up".
So the future is being made today

Quote Originally Posted by bridgman View Post
One of the big changes with 6xx was at least partially separating the programming model from the hardware implementation, so big changesa in the hardware have relatively less impact on the driver than in previous generations. 6xx and 7xx are very different hardware implementations but the programming interface is pretty similar. The downside was that it took a lot of work to get drivers running on the new programming model in the first place, but we're mostly past that now.
It is much appreciated nevertheless

Quote Originally Posted by bridgman View Post
The discussion about "separating" was for DRM and UVD, shouldn't have any impact on 3D. I obviously can't comment on status.
Reading Wikipedia it sounds like quite a complicated task!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Video_Decoder