And yet 90% of games are optimized for nVidia because up until recently, they had a much larger pull with devs than ATi, regardless of performance.
I guess you're just not used to it sucking for you?
And actually, the stuttering you're describing is a bug, has to do with the loading of the textures/sounds. I can dig up some fixes that will alleviate it quite a bit, especially if your machine has a large amount of RAM. I used them to make Half Life 2 purr like a kitten on my rig.