I think I've been hearing that ATI/AMD drivers are about to catch up with nVidia for 20 years.

You, for many definitions of "you", never work on a supercomputer. Despite the fact that today's smartphones are faster than a Cray-1 of the yesteryear. Similarly, you don't need to have ATI/AMD to catch the absolute performance crown from Nvidia, like AMD did several times with Intel, for you to use AMD solutions.

We'll see how smart the market and the monopolist are this time around, yes, in the next 12-24 months... and maybe longer.

Well, most of the new DoE machines are MI300 based so AMD seems to be doing pretty well even at the supercomputer level :)

Good point. I forgot about the broken record that was gaming drivers.

I was specifically referring to AMD's investments in a unified computing stack (their equivalent of CUDA) which were supposed to bring them to computational parity in the AI/ML.