I have an HD 7950 and while it runs well, almost every game gets some sort of damn artifacts and it's really annoying. The video card (I'm positive it's responsible, changed out just about every part in my PC and the OS) also causes my computer to BSOD after a few days of uptime, usually in the middle of the night but sometimes during the day like 1-2 hours after I left the computer, though the PC does distributed computing on both the CPU and GPU nearly 24/7. Also had a problem where the card incessantly shut its fans on/off every 5 seconds when the screen would turn off, though that might be fixed in the 12.11 b11 drivers. When playing Team Fortress 2, my card likes to randomly go into 2D clock mode and enter a nasty, jittery 60FPS fit with 100% GPU usage, when my display runs natively at 120Hz.
My systems with NVIDIA cards (4 series or older) never BSOD and can run fine for weeks on end. When I RMA'd my first 7950 due to a fan failure after 3 weeks of owning it, I had a GTX 460 1GB in my computer at the time and Tribes: Ascend felt a lot smoother. Never had any framerate issues with TF2 either on that card. I've also not been able to get Steam for Linux Beta's TF2 to launch without an OpenGL error (or even get the drivers to install "properly" with my 7950 system) yet NVIDIA's Linux drivers automagically worked on my other system.
I hate to be angry at AMD for what should be a kickass card, but my experience with it has not been 100% delightful. My 5770 and 6950 worked quite well for me, but this 7950 has been quite a downer (not to mention that my XFX DD 7950 games at 87c and sounds like a jet engine). I should have payed up for the 670 but I didn't want some more expensive card that only had 2GB of RAM, 256bit bus and stripped away GPU compute grunt, but in the end, my games do run (though not flawlessly) and World Community Grid runs well on the 7xxx cards so it's not anywhere near a total loss. If GK110 were out (and not some insane wallet raping price like $700), I would have gladly chosen it.
Sorry for the rant, but I hope the OP's incoming 7970 serves him better than what I described above about my 6 months with my 7950.