^ Valid points. But there are other things which make me stay with Nvidia. These are things I've experienced or noticed on forums. Your experience may be different, but of course I'm always going to place more weight on my own observations when making decisions.
Compatibility.
In IL2 my 4870 had graphics corruption issues unless I stayed with the 8.9 drivers. The same happened again to 5xxx owners. (then they fixed the drivers, then broke them again in the next version, then fixed...)
DCS: A-10C (yes, it's a beta, but I still think it's relevant) there are quite a few high-end (i7, etc) computer owners complaining about terrible frame-rates. The link between them? They have late-model ATI cards.
In general, on the forums I frequent, I notice more threads about problems with ATI-based hardware and compatibility than nvidia.
Control panel.
I don't like nvidia's CP much, but the ATI CP, I cannot stand! For example, when using the on-board ATI stuff on a TVPC, I needed to disable over-scan (IIRC). After much fruitless poking around, I found the answer on a forum - you need to press a little, UN-LABELLED button (which did not look like a button!) to get to the relevant section...
Then there's the catalyst AI, which seems to need to be turned off for most of my games, making me wonder why it is there, and enabled by default.
I could put up with the control panel if I were confident about the card's functionality, but my observations about compatibility issues put me off, to the point where I justify the extra cost and (somewhat irrelevant) extra heat/power usage. These are just my observations, no doubt others will see the opposite, or the opposite might be true for a different set of games.
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