I only use nvidia cards (with the proprietary drivers) because they were the only ones I could find with decent framerates playing something like Minecraft at 1080p resolution.

Do the free ATI drivers get 60fps (or even 30fps @ 1080p resolution) for most full screen games? If so, could you tell me which model of card you are achieving this with?

I switched to an nvidia card about a year ago because the free ATI drivers either gave terrible OpenGL performance or some apps didn't work at all because features were missing from the drivers and the proprietary drivers gave me all kinds of horrible glitches.