That is odd ND I have found just the opposite. Geforce has always been very stable for me. I am zero for 2 when it comes to radeons and Maya. After the last attempt to use one failed I vowed never to touch a ATI card again. Actually I had a third horrific experience back in my video editing days with a ATI "All in Wonder" card (yes it's ancient). I just had one driver problem after another and after nearly a year hair pulling I renamed the card the "All in BLUNDER" and tossed in onto a street near my house and gleefully watched as cars ran it over!

You are absolutely correct about drivers being critical and once again I have found nvidia to be far more stable then ATI in the driver development department. I would argue to the death that 10 years ago the ATI drivers were the biggest piece a crap on earth. However, I have heard that there latest stuff is more stable.

If I owned a goose that laid golden eggs I would of course buy a Quadro, although to be honest I would still feel foolish dumping $6000 on a graphics card that I know would be obsolete just about the time I got it out of it's wrapper. I bought a FX 2000 and barely had it 6 months before I had a Geforce card that was out performing it at 1/10th the price.

If I could afford to upgrade my graphics cards right now I would go for a 580. They are fastest of the single GPU consumer cards. The 590 is really just a pair of 560's in a single dual width package. Since Maya make no use of the SLI'd cores and since the slave card only runs at a fraction of the primary cards speed (because of power and thermal constraints) you'd see no benefit, generate more heat, and burn more electricity for no real gain.

I was thinking of going hydro but the thought of all the things that can fail in a water cooled system scare me.

The bottom line though is this. As of Maya 2012 there is ZERO support for consumer cards. Autodesk and Alias used to qualify a couple all the way up to 2010. They list a couple Geforce and Radeon cards in the qual tables but they are all listed as untested or unqualifed. I can attest that I had nearly zero problems with my aging 285's until Maya 2012. Since switching to 2012 I have had and still have some very serious and frustrating problems.