Originally Posted by Gennadios

It's funny you should mention this, but I recently swore to never buy an ATI card again for very similar stability issues.

The vast majority of games would run with no problems, but the few failures would be spectacular, some games would be unable to render ANY textures, others would simply crash frequently (one such game I've owned for 6 months and I played it for the first time a few weeks ago when upgrading to a computer /w an Nvidia card) Most of the crashes that I could track were usually caused by the Catalyst AI Driver optimizations, even with optimization turned off, my debugger would usually lead me to that one catalystai.dll as the culprit.

The only reason I bring this up is to let you know that it's no bed of roses on the ATI side either. Nvidia seems much more stable to with regards to the last gen games I currently own, but my hardcore gamer days are over, so whatever's most stable at the moment has my full support.