OSNews

I had an ati card way back in the day, and had nothing but problems with it. Bizarre artifacts on textures in games, certain games just not working, etc. When I started making real money rather then just minimum wage stuff during school, I bought a mid-range NVidia card that gave me great performance, and allowed me to play the newest games for years, eventually even compensating for a cruddy cpu. After about four years it died, and this time I went for a mid range ATi card, again, nothing but bizarre problems. On that card, I would get this wierd thing happen where the lower left hand corner of my monitor would jiggle up and down for no aparent reason.

Around that time I switched to linux full time. Enemy-Territory is IMHO still one of the greatest FPS games of all time. It took me about a month of serious research and fiddling to get it to do hardware ogl(i ended up having to do a manual compile, and then copy certain .so files to various locations the installer didnt put them). After all that work, I got far worse performance then windows, and significantly less stability. After about a year on that card, I bought another NVidia. The install on linux was incredably easy, and if anything I got better performance on ET and UT2k3 on linux then windows.

Now, thats just my experience. I have a friend who is a computer guy, but not a gamer. He had an aging GeForce 2 in his pc, but he wanted to play ut2k3 with me and another friend. Against my advice to pay the extra few dollars and go NVidia, my friend went out with him and got him a mid range ATi card. The performance jump was astounding between his several year old card and the new one, but he found he was regularily getting BSODs when he never had before, even after a total wipe/reinstall of xp. Since his machine was used primarily for work, not gaming, he ended up putting his ancient GF2 back into his PC, because the regular crashes were too much of an interruption, and the ati card became an expensive paperweight on his desk.

Last story, during my second round with ATi, I was at a friend of a friends house, talking about the major upgrade I had done on my pc. He worked at a local computer shop, and was planning his own upgrade. When he told me the components he was planning on buying, I asked him why not ati, as you get much more bang for your buck. He said that their shop actually has a policy to push NVidia, because they had yet to have a machine come back with an nvidia related problem, but had ati problems all the time.

All that to say, If ati works great for you, consider yourself lucky. People don't just bash it because its not nvidia, but because of regularily getting burned by shoddy hardware and drivers.