But Microsoft drivers also accounted for 18 percent of crashes, while Advanced Micro Devices logged in with just over 9 percent and Intel had just under that figure. In the Nvidia-AMD battle, it was generally understood that Nvidia's driver problems came earlier in the year while AMD's occurred later. In late November, HP Gaming's Rahul Sood was complaining about AMD's Vista drivers, saying, "AMD started out well, with better Vista drivers then Nvidia, but then Nvidia whipped past them like a Ford GT would against a Chrysler Minivan."

What a difference a few months makes. According to Sood, AMD's graphics side of the house has put any lingering Vista driver issues to bed with a hot-fix for its ATI Catalyst driver issued following the release of Vista service pack 1 in March.

Sood, founder of high-performance gaming system builder VoodooPC, which was acquired by Hewlett-Packard in late 2006, currently serves as CTO HP's Global Gaming Business and regularly blogs at rahulsood.com. In a recent blog post he writes:

Well, I mentioned in [a previous blog post] that Windows Vista Service Pack 1 was released, and shortly after ATI released a hot-fix for their Catalyst driver. Since then I've been playing a number of games, and I honestly cannot believe what I'm seeing.

Yes, I can't believe my eyes ... It's like I'm dreaming, but I'm just not 100 percent sure a pinch will change anything. For the last few weeks I have not had ONE driver drop in Vista with ATI Crossfire ... all of the games I had the error with are running much better.

This should be a lesson to everyone: ATI is doing great things on the graphics side right now. Frame rates are NOT the most important thing -- the most important factor in gaming is stability and visual quality. If you can buy a PC with optimized graphics for the display resolution that you are running (in my case 2560x1600) then you'll be a much happier person, believe me.

So cheers to ATI, you graphic ninjas, for getting it right.