Has ATi stepped it up with their driver support or are they still shit?
Anecdotal evidence will always be all over the place and ultimately your friends, peers, and trusted sites will be the ones painting the picture for you of bad or good driver support. They are both great nowadays and really your card choice should be influenced more by your desired build's size/power/heat/noise profile, budget, parts availability, and preferred OEM (MSI, GB, Asus, HiS).
The next card I buy will probably be a chibi-Zotac 660ti for a mini build unless I get a new contract earlier than year-end in which case I'm going all-out O_O
My personal experience with
drivers after buying both over the last 3 years only (older experiences don't count anymore):
Nvidia:
+OK driver support, more options for high end tweaking of AA and the like
+seemingly better SLI support at a game's launch (but I hated running 2x cards so i only tried it once with dual-460s)
+much better laptop drivers offset by worse performing, more expensive, and hotter laptop GPUs
-mediocre multi-monitor support
-last year, auto-updating to the latest Nvidia drivers killed 2 of my GPUs, my little brother's, and my friend's. We were reformatting, swapping them around, and I even tried installing them in a new PC I built in frustration because of this issue but they would always cause blue screens after that driver update. Note that this is not a BIOS update, just nvidia's whql drivers.
AMD:
+installing new drivers have never killed any of my AMD cards
+OK driver support, Steam bugs you to update
+very good multi-monitor support. You can create shortcuts to instantly load your profile for combinations of dual monitor, rotated screen, HDTV only, all 3 screens, etc.
-mediocre Crossfire support where often I never noticed the difference between 1 card or 2 running. I don't like doing game-specific tweaking at the driver/profile level so this is a minus for me (only ever tried with dual-6950s @ 1080p so I didn't even need it).
-advanced tweaking options are better using 3rd party programs
-mediocre and vendor-locked laptop drivers that sometimes don't act like they're installed. Power-saving and integrated/dedicated GPU switching features are cumbersome when they even work. Thankfully, AMD laptop GPUs perform much better on average at lower price points.
urk guess this OT will be closed.