ATI's Catalyst

ATI has had a pretty bad reputation when it comes to drivers. Looking to improve this reputation, ATI is now following Nvidia's lead by picking a special name for their drivers: Catalyst. These driver releases should now come more often, and help performance of the cards.HardOCP and Tech-Report both have reports with benchmarks. Here's a snip from what HardOCP had to say.

ATI is changing, that much we think we can all agree on. They are more aggressive than ever in getting the end user what they want. They had serious driver problems in the past, but it is safe to say those problems are gone...for the moment. While the Radeon 8500 was not a GeForce3 killer at its introduction because of driver implementation, it's certainly closer to that now. If ATI could have implemented such robust drivers at the market launch of the 8500, the video card landscape might be a bit different from today. In fact, the 8500 is riding right up on the GeForce4 Ti 4200's heels. If you've been reluctant in the past to try out the 8500 because of driver problems, you may want to give it another shot now days. The 8500 can be found for bargain basement prices and it really delivers beyond bargain basement performance.