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Guess: Because of the libraries they're linking to? I may be imagining things but it seems the nvidia driver is less loosely tied to it and will work with any recentish version of X. I'm pretty sure I've upgraded X before without upgrading the nvidia driver and everything continued to work fine. If I'm not imagining things, why don't they do what nvidia is doing?
Last edited by ernesto (2011-11-27 16:18:22)
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nVidia has to update their drivers to support recent X.Org just like AMD does. nVidia however includes support for the newest X.Org to their drivers as soon as it is reasonable to do so, whereas Catalysts are always lagging behind the upstream. When an updated X.Org hits Arch's extra, chances are that you already have a compatible nVidia driver, with AMD it's not until after several weeks or months after new X.Org release when they update the drivers.
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The Xorg folks change ABI all the time to accommodate new features. *All* drivers need to be updated to the new ABI. It's just that when a driver is open source, the Xorg people can update it themselves. Closed drivers they of course can't, it's up to the respective vendors to do it. And here Nvidia has a much better development and release policy than the fglrx people do.
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