If I recall correctly, Microsoft published a report showing that nVidia drivers were the number one source of BSOD's in Vista a couple years ago. Not once have I seen any objective data that showed ATI having the same amount of stability issues as nVidia, yet we continue to get the same couple of posters posting these so called ATI stability issues. I don't quite get it.
The time line was:
Vista and the G80 were released the same day. 6 months later ATI released their first DX10 card.
So for the first 6 months of vista nvidia was the only one with DX10. DX10 originally had some bugs in it, which (surprise surprise!) caused crashing. MS tried to blame the whole thing on nvidia of course.
Also, nVidia had much more market share at the time (and the figure did not account for the percentage of people who actually owned nvidia vs ATI cards).
ATI did have HORRID drivers which I wouldn't use even if I was paid to... when AMD purchased ATI they have vastly improved the focus on drivers. Serious and persistent bugs that have been around and well known for years were finally fixed. Within months of the takeover several bugs that caused driver or OS files corruption during install were fixed, as well as many others.
Overall I would say that nVidia still has better drivers, especially for linux. But nvidia's drivers are now suffering from their stupid DRM schemes.
1. nVidia driver DRM disables physX if an ATI GPU is detected (even an IGP)
2. nVidia driver DRM disables SLI (multi card SLI that is) if the motherboard does not contain encrypted keys which prove that the mobo maker is paying nvidia 5$ per board
3. To combat cracked drivers that remove the above DRM, nvidia began introducing extra checks and game specific game breaking mechanisms if you fail said checks, such as reversing the gravity in one game for example...
Meanwhile AMD decided to release the specs needed to create an open source driver, its still got a long way to go but it is a reality.
Also, AMD has superior hardware this gen, being 6 months earlier to the market, and superior hardware (especially in terms of power efficiency).
All that though doesn't change that for the entirety of its existence as an independent company ATI had really poor drivers compared to nVidia. And that today (where ATI is a subsidiary of AMD) it is still somewhat behind nVidia on the driver front. (but it is certainly tolerable today)
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