As others have said, NVidia’s devrel sucks. ATI gets back to you the same day, every time. ATI’s drivers used to be pretty bad, but now they’re on par with NVidia as far as I’m concerned. I’ve found about the same # of bugs on both (a handful over a year).
At this time I would not buy a NVidia card. The ATI’s are cheaper, faster and have more usable features.
fresh, my experience was the complete opposite. I experienced a ‘bend over backwards for anyone’ attitude from nvidia when I had d3d problems. I’ve had contact with three nvidia people and all of them exhibited this attitude. They also always asked me how they’re doing and what I think they need to improve upon. I’m not kidding you. I was surprised at this first but then realized that those nvidia devs must really like their job for them to care about nobody.
Originally posted by DopeFish:
[b]ATIs drivers were nothing but problems before my Radeon9500 died.
]
How did your 9500 die? That is not a good sign, unless you o/ced it to death?
As for dev relations, Nvidia wins for me, last time I had to talk to ATI, I had to wait weeks, if not more, but then again, this was back with the Rage 128 line of products. I can only hope they got better. 
Originally posted by Elixer:
How did your 9500 die? That is not a good sign, unless you o/ced it to death?
Had nothing but problems with it from the word go (nothing overclocked in my system… was a 100% stable system which hadnt crashed in MANY MANY months). Put the ATI card in and it was crashing constantly, had corrupt display (not just in games), bad stuttering, lockups for no apparent reason, VGA output dying quite often for no reason, etc.
People on rage3d forums suggested to remove the shim from the card (as it had helped others), and my card died during the process… so its my own fault really, for taking other peoples advice. ATI tech support GAVE UP on my case.
Pretty appauling… and now Im waiting a LONG time for my new card to be shipped (not a replacement card from them, as it was my own fault for the card dying (however all the other problems…) but one im paying for entirely). I think we’re up to 3 weeks and they havent even taken the money from my visa… god knows how long itll take for the card to actually arrive