All of those issues have been solved in Catalyst 13.2 beta releases. Firefox the only bug is you get small black tiles in the menu bar sometimes, it's not even all the time.
My 7950 is rock solid in about 95% of games at my current settings 1100/1575 @ 1056mv. Some games need a little more (Crysis 1 & 2), 1093mv, but I just have it set as a second profile in Afterburner. My card is a little loud but thats just MY model. Other than that they great cards .
Threads like this are generally full of bull****. Neither's drivers are any better or worse than the other's....
I just found this article which goes into detail with the underlying issues I'm worried about. What do you all think? It was written in December with 12.11 drivers. EDIT: Add link http://techreport.com/review/23981/radeon-hd-7950-vs-geforce-gtx-660-ti-revisited
What problems? My HD4850 only had an issue with 1 driver (8.12) that only affect a useless "feature" that AMD added to the drivers....my HD7870 had no issues of any type with any driver.
I'm sorry, but what? Sapphire makes the R&D boards for AMD when they are working on new chips/cards. They also make ALL of the dual GPU cards and every other company just rebadges them. They also sell the most AMD cards in the world. They have been with AMD since the beginning.
Sapphire does NOT make "ALL" of the dual GPU cards....lol. Sapphire has nothing to do with the Asus ARES cards....
http://techreport.com/review/24218/a-driver-update-to-reduce-radeon-frame-times Expect ongoing improvements.
I thought i would offer my 2 cents on this subject.I have owned 4-5 AMD cards and 4 Nvidia cards.I found in the passed Nvidia cards i had back in the 8800 series and 200 3 of them died 2 were laptops gpu's and burnt themselves out and also the crap ass drivers which both AMD and Nvidia have had.I have a 5770 a 6450 and a 6850 all those cards are stable no bsod or anything the only way i have had one is with to high a overclock.And there is the fact that you get better performance for price $$.Here in australia i can get a better deal then with AMD then Nvidia and the 7000 series drivers are really good so far from what i have seen on my mates pcs.And based on your price range you could get a 7950-7970 both are very stable and run like a dream just bought one myself.Hope i helped and offerd some good feedback.
I should have specified reference cards. Manufacturers are free to design their own non-reference cards if they like.
From my understanding the standard 7970 locked cards are set at a certain voltage and on the newer cards that voltage cannot be adjusted. Flashing the bois on a 7970 to a 7970GHZ ED reprograms for higher voltage which obviously allows for higher OC's. This is why I would like a "reference" board as I've heard non reference boards cannot be flashed. Does this information sound correct?
This is my first AMD card, i always had Nvidia . The major problem i had was with Firefox/Flash... but i'm using Chrome now, no problems. Occasional texture flickering on some games (Crysis 1 and BC2) but nothing very serious... had similar problems with Nivida in the past.
I actually think the voltage is set by asic quality because i have seen some people post ss of gpuz under full load with much higher voltage then my card. Im at work but later i could probably post a ss.
Asking if drivers are stable is a silly thing to ask. People here can easily say that they've never had issues with drivers, but as soon as you pop a card into your computer, you could very well be getting issues out the wazoo. It all depends on what you play, when you play it, what drivers you're using, and what BIOS your card has. A more valid question is will you experience issues with the programs you're using? That, unfortunately, is something that can only be answered through trial and error. I've been using ATI/AMD for 7 consecutive years. As far as serious issues are concerned, and I've had less driver issues (in a single GPU configuration) than I do fingers on one hand. Some people here have vastly different stories, claiming that they've had countless issues in less than a year. My advice to you is to not ask if drivers are stable, because it's rhetorical. You're better off asking yourself what features you want, or if you will even make use of the features unique to each brand. For me, the answer was simple. I got tired of waiting for AMD to give us more driver level graphics options. There's not a single game that I don't play without some sort of driver tweak, and to be frank, Nvidia has more than 6x the Anti Aliasing options as opposed to AMD. Plus, Nvidia allows for driver enabled ambient occlusion. On the flip side, AMD's cards are currently much easier to overclock than Nvidia's, but raw performance wasn't a concern of mine after seeing how much weight a HD5970 can pull at 1080p. If you don't care about any of that, then go with whatever best fits your budget.
Biggest instabilities usually come from unstable overclocks unless there is a known bug in an application.