I have taken all the Nvidia cards out of my machines , the software drivers are junk and have caused crashes one after another. 
I have bought ATI and the drivers work and work well, also the detail on the screen is twice as good as Nvidia. I keep seeing write ups on Nvidia being the best, It makes me wonder who is getting free stuff or paid off. Because it is not what I have found in the last year or so with Nvidia.

Despite the "better" hardware AMD is loosing on the GPGPU front due to their policy of not releasing an SDK. I can bet that in every US university which has an image processing or computer vision group, a graduate student (or better) is using CUDA. This is a huge "human capital" gain for nVidia. (to be fair AMD released the full documentation of their "stream processor" but not that many people hurried up to make an assembler or compiler)

Even though it seems that the ATI hardware may have certain advantages, it's pretty clear that the catalyst drivers will be their major growing pains.

I thought I've heard that ATI (or AMD, but I tend not to associate the two too closely) does have a "close-to-metal" API for GPGPU purposes, but it is just not enough to entice the GPGPU crowd to start using ATI parts.

How is "200-210€ + VAT" for 3870 to be considered as "good pricing", seeing how several brands have their 8800GT going for well under 200€ already? If anything, this is TERRIBLE pricing by Ati and were it not for Nvidia's problems with meeting the demand, these 3870s would be dead on arrival. As it is, they are standing on some very very thin ice.

You people who say that ATI has problems with the software side......i have an 8800gt, it took me 4 reinstalls of windows to get rid of a crash on 3d mode bug that nvidia has known about since the 7 series.

This is something they havent fixed because they are sloppy and lazy.

ati has never had this problem, sure they have had other problems, but never have i had my system BSOD due to a falwed driver every time you to and access the card beyond a basic 2d desktop level.

that said i will take the ati card over this 8800gt i have in here any day knowing that i wont have my system bsod due to sloppy driver programing and bug testing.