7970 vs 680 pic quality

You won't be able to tell the difference. However, the 7970 does tend to take the performance crown when detail and resolution are ramped up, even more so with the new 12.7 beta drivers. If you're concerned about image quality and don't mind the extra heat I'd say the 7970.

Complaints about AMDs drivers are well founded but they are vastly improved over what they were a year ago.

From what I remember, the new 7xxx series from AMD has inferior image quality, compared to the 6xxx series (controversy over framerates). This might have been resolved in a driver update, but most likely the 680 has better picture quality.

If you look back at Tom's articles - 78XX drivers were indeed fixed. It seems lately nvidia has also had it's share of driver issues. Before you call me fanboy - I have 2 GTX460s.;-)
I also agree with Pinhedd - doubt you could tell the difference.

-Bruce

There was initially a report of degraded image quality in some games. Tom's did a test on it and you could barely tell the difference. AMD tracked it down to a botched shader optimization and fixed it in Catalyst 12.3. Since then I've not heard anything

There is no noticeable difference in image quality overall (I don't consider something like Nvidia's ability to force SSAO via drivers in Skyrim an image quality difference).