All in all, it's not that the drivers performance was poor per se, but AMD did nothing about providing a software ecosystem, which amount to its hardware wasn't realistically usable unless your pockets were so big that you can do AMD's job and fund the re-development of the whole ecosystem from scratch.
In other words, it made MUCH better ROI to just use Nvidia, pay a little bit more for the hardware, and save millions on software :)
When I was working for a Unix commercial graphics software company, the CTO told me how bad the information he received under ATI’s NDA was: different revisions of the same chipset had contradictory register settings, so the driver had to identify the revision before writing a value to the write-only configuration registers. The same chipset might need a 0 or a 1; writing the wrong values could crash the driver.