I used to have nVidia cards up until i built my i7 920 last year. I switched to Ati at that point to keep the cost down, with a 4870 1Gb (it also had a full GB of Ram, as opposed to 768Mb of comparable nVidia cards at the time for the same price). Unlucky for me it was a deffective card and got fried, but thanks to the 3 year warranty i switched it for a 4890 for free and i've had no problems since.
Before someone goes off about poor manufacturing quality in general, let me say that i also had an nVidia card go dead on me in the past. I had a NX6600 whose fan got fried and it almost killed the card, but the hassle in that case was that fan damage was not covered under the warranty. Also, replacing the fan yourself would void the warranty. So, i was forced to void it to repair damage that should have been covered under the warranty. In that sense, my experience in troubleshooting with nVidia was worse than doing it with Ati.
I dual-boot with winXP SP3 on one disk and Win7 64bit on the other, so i didn't have any problems with drivers...IL2 and other old games stay installed under XP where i run older drivers, new stuff goes under Win7 where i run the latest ones.
In fact, i think that there will be no problems whatsoever with Ati and SoW. The problems with IL2 are because of the fact that IL2 uses OpenGL. SoW will use DirectX, so it makes sense to buy the cards that deliver the most processing power for the least amount of money and watts. I never buy top of the line GPUs, i wait until they are in the $150 range before i pick them up. Since SoW will use DX, if i were to buy a new GPU for it i'd get a monster 5xxx series card from Ati instead of a 4xx series card from nVidia. Performance would be comparable since i run a single 1680x1050 (16:10) 22" dell monitor, so i'd rather buy something that generates less heat and costs less, rather than have the GPU fans screaming all the time and raising my room temperature an extra 5 degrees celsius, it's hot enough during the summer as it is
