I don't know how accurate that award or box advertising is. All I can recount is my anecdotal experience. Just about every tech I talked to about it during that era disliked the ATI drivers. Even though I liked my ATI cards (especially my AIW), the drivers were the reason I stopped buying or recommending their cards, till the 4k series. And the drivers were the reason the computer shop I worked in at the time stopped putting them in new machines or selling them unless the customer insisted. The Nvidia drivers weren't that great either but at least they released betas at such a pace that you could find something that worked nice with the latest game or you didn't have to wait long.
As I said, maybe I was living in an alternate universe. But I disliked the drivers enough to discount otherwise decent hardware. But since the increasing complexity of GPUs has dragged down the quality of drivers from all GPU manufacturers, I can't really justify that as a reason for avoiding any particular brand.
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