i once had an NVIDIA card. Geforce MX 440. my GOD what a piece of ****. back in that day at least, i found it was nvidia drivers that were well and truly ****. ever since then, i've had an ATI/AMD. i had brief driver issues when i was still on AGP when they dropped support in new drivers, and just today when the power play levels weren't working right after installing the newest. that is partly my fault for interfering a bit with a modified BIOS and using MSI Afterburner, and nevertheless was solved by re-installing after, as you say, an OCD driver sweeper purge of the old ones (which i didn't do the first time. i normally do, but i was feeling lucky.) that said, i don't consider myself a fanboy, and i am on the whole disappointed with anti-aliasing on AMD chips. it's never easy to get it to work, and often i can't at all. the "override application settings" rarely works, i'm not sure what "enhance application settings" is even supposed to be doing, and it seems to be down to the particular game whether the in-game settings will play nice with AMD. which, more often than not is no, since it seems 90% of the games i play have the NVIDIA logo slapped in the intro movies. i still haven't ever been able to get AA working in FSO.
my next purchase is likely to be an nvidia 670, solely because they finally took the price/performance title from AMD. unless i haven't committed until a new gen comes out, in which case i'll have to see how the chips fall. if i do make the switch, i'll be looking forward to hopefully having the brand that plays nicer with games, but i will sorely miss how familiar i've become with radeons and how to tweak and overclock them well. i'll have a lot of re-learning to do.
