I think it's like hard drives. You have a bad experience with one manufacturer and jump ship, and subconsciously justify that decision to yourself as rational because of how bad the experience was, not because the manufacturer you're jumping to is any better.

> Nvidia's windows drivers crash all the time too

Counter anecdote mode: engage!

As an owner of many Nvidia cards, I find they crash infrequently, and when they do it's because:

* I was running Windows 8 Preview and pre-release Nvidia drivers

* There was some sort of hardware problem with my systems

I have used four ATI/AMD graphics cards over the years. Not all of them were negative experiences, but none of them were relatively more positive than using Nvidia hardware.

Counterpoint - ive found amd drivers to be pretty good on linux and they support multiple rotated monitors and color matching across multiple monitors much better than nvidia.

I've been running a GTX 680 on Windows 7 for the past year, and count 0 crashes, none from the desktop nor games, though I'm been playing fewer and fewer games these days.

Before that, I had an ATI HD 5870 for over a year. I had about 3 crashes on the desktop, some that lost me work. The anger from losing work is what I remember most strongly, and made me vow not to buy ATI next time.

Before that, an 8800 GTX. I had 0 crashes from the desktop over several years.

I was running Nouveau drivers on the 670 for no more than 60 seconds before it crashed.

I've had both, non-consecutively over 6 different cards over the years. I've not had any large problems at all, and my current GTX 670 has been performing like a champ for about 15 months now, no video crashes.