Depends on your GPU. I had an ATI card back then. So with every patch (and driver update for that matter) the situation only continued to deteriorate further. By the time I jumped ship the game was so visually corrupted it almost seemed like it had to be intentional. The FUBAR was really very elaborate.

Do you mean the ATI HDR problem? You will be happy to know it was never fixed. I can't use HDR without losing all water in the game which is amusing swimming in the air with Mirelurks.

What I'm talking about corrupted everything. It was like a strange kind of corruption you sometimes see in digital videos. I can't really remember the exact look of it but this was somewhere between that and making the game look like it was turning into Dwarf Fortress.

To begin with it only hit in high up places like Tenpenny or the top of Rivet City. But a few patches and / or driver updates later it could happen everywhere. The game was also very unstable with that card. Something else switching to Nvidia fixed.

Can't say I have ever had that one. Always worked fine on my 4850 and still works on my new 6850 well as long as I keep HDR off.

Lucky you. Were you running XP at the time? I'm sure that's a part of it. It struck me that ATI dropped XP support like a stone as soon as Win 7 RC was released. After that my brother got that card for a while and he had to roll the drivers back a year just to get XP to load without a fuckton of error messages.

Could be that, I've been on Win7 ever since the Beta. Then again if someone developed a graphics card with no problems whatsoever were would the fun in that be? :D

Yeah, I made a permanent switch as soon as Creative actually and unexpectedly supported my sound card for once. Then I upgraded that shortly after anyway. Go figure.

As for the perfect GPU: there's no hope of that while both sides are fervently trying to battle one another instead of realising that they could win over a lot more customers by fixing the long standing problems associated with their respective brands.