ATI poor driver support for dx10?

I've read that ATI's driver support for dx10 is currently, to say the least, 'lacking.'

How much improvement can we expect and how long until we see it??

Is ATI's driver support in general far behind Nvidia's? (If i only intend to use dx9, is ATI's driver support on par with nvidia?)

 

Both had and still have issues with DX10 and Vista.

Just ask the nVidia crowd about their SLi support.

As for them being equal, both are solid in the desktop space and IMO both suck in the laptop space because neither provies mobile drivers easily making you rely on your oblivious OEM laptop mfr, who thinks as long as 2D desktop works then drivers from 2006 would be fine.

Also depends on what you plan on doing with them as well as the apps you prefer, each has their strength/weakness.

Look for the feature of the hardware, the drivers for both are equally good/bad and both can be suplemented by 3rd party moded solutions.

 

In general, is compatibility for games about the same? It seems like I am always seeing "fixed issue with ATI cards" in the release notes for patches.

 

You will see "fixed in this version" in both, the difference is you will mainly see that in nV when they update it's once in a blue moon for WHQL certified drivers, but for betas it's about the same.
Some games play better out of the box for one company and others for the other. Both receive boosts, and while the various developers programs like Get In The Game or The Way It's Meant To Be Played might be helpful in reducing bugs, usually both start out with some, and both improve with a driver release or two after the launch of a game.

It can be argued that to maximize the HD2K and HD3K AMD designs you need the drivers to best assign workloads. This is a credible argument, but the differences are still somewhat minor.

The main thing is the age of the architectures, both are finally maturing, after both had long early struggles with driver stability and features.

Anyways, it's rare that drivers alone would allow a significantly beter card to function worse than the other brand. It's rare that a GF8400M will outperform an M-HD2600XT or an HD2600Pro will outperform a GF8800M due to drivers alone.