ATI Radeon stability with gaming?

I'm most likely buying the 8500 LE 128MB one.

I play Counter-Strike as often as I can. I've noticed in the advanced technical forums at counter-strike.net, there are tons of posts about ATI's and WinXP [I plan to upgrade with Win98SE]. I think it's mainly FPS issues, but i'm not quite sure.

So how stable is this video card with CS, and other games for that matter [ie. RTWC, etc...]? Is this b/c they don't update drivers as often as Nvidia or could it be something else?

Well, ATI really have bad driver suport.
I just moved from one Hercules Prophet MX to Radeon 7500 64mb ddr.
It performs extremely well, but it's a totally new world! Almost nothing you used to know about nVidia cards are aplicable to ATI cards.
Just to ilustrate, I can't make my windows (XP Pro) load to desktop with the original ATI drivers! But there are tweaked drivers (Omega Drivers), made by one entusiast, and man, they work very good (why ATI don't contract this guy???).
I'm getting almost 4500 3DMarks (SE) with my system. Well, if I (we) have the money, I would go to GF4 ti4200, but if you are on low budget, go to the Rad8500 le. You will have some pain in the *** to make it work, but it's fun, cause in the end you will have an extraordinary card for what you paid for.

ATI has come a long way on driver support. My 8500LE works flawlessly in all games and with everything I throw at it.

For the price, it can't be beat.

My Radeon 8500 should be here on friday. I can't wait. It's time to put down this Radeon 64 DDR. Actually over the next few month's I'll be piecing together a machine for the wife for school. It will be kept up in our bedroom. So the TV out on the radeon 64 will come in handy for DVD movies up there.

Dude i have a radeon 8500 64mb ddr and its crazy i love it i updated the drivers and my performance even went higher...this card is crazy 9200 3dmarks at stock and i can play games for hours at a time with no probs but it does heat a little so i put on memory sinks which helped with fps (+5) after like 8 hours on non stop gaming...but the card works flawlessly