I suppose the problem with anecdotal evidence, is that it tends to be hugely subjective, and always suceptible to the vastly different setups we all run.
I use an ATi x1900MC in my main rig, and an nVidia 7950gtx in my laptop. Starting with the basics:
Driver selection. It took me about 3 hours to decide which driver to use for the laptop. Granted, some of this was down to the fact that it was a laptop, and I wanted the 'latest' 'stable' drivers for it. For the ATi I just need to know what month it is and select the numerically sequenced driver to match (8.1=2008.January
my kind of simple.) Where as the nVidia ones don't appear to have a pattern anyone with less than an indepth knowledge of imaginary numbers can fathom
Notice how I used the words 'latest' and 'stable' - while I appreciate that some of us like to use beta stuff and accept the risks - you will also not hear those 2 words when talking about the ATi drivers. Not to say that they are perfect, but 99% of the time you can simply pick up this month's drivers and go
Stability. Anecdotally, my laptop often crashes in graphically intensive games (bioshock/COD4), my desktop doesn't. Could be overheating, could be drivers, could be any number of things, that's the problem with anecdotal evidence, but for me, ATi drivers 'appear' far more stable than nVidias ones.
Can't be hard to track down the sales numbers, (will see what I can find), but as mentioned, intel sell far more 'graphics solutions' than ATi and nVidia combined, and they have less crashes - draw your own conclusions.
Finally the 'overclocking thing'. We are a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, infinitesimally small, irrelevant corner of the market. As a whole I doubt we would cause so much of as a wrinkle in the stats. The crashing will not be because of 'overclocking' or fiddling. There just aren't enough of us to impact Vista's global footprint.
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