Gonna get my Geek on...sorry, y'all.
I'll take Framerates, thanks.
The current generation of ATI cards (the 58xx series) will
easily out-framerate the current crop of NVIDIA cards (the 2xx series), but this is because the ATI cards are an entire generation newer. The reason for this disparity is that NVIDIA hasn't released their new 3xx series (based on '
Fermi' core) cards yet. NVIDIA seems pretty confident that the 3xx will outperform the 58xx, but of course there haven't been any public tests done yet...just public
mudslinging. I'll tell you this, though...if it doesn't, NVIDIA will probably end up going under or getting bought by someone at a discount. Or, more likely, they'll leverage their CUDA (or OpenCL) compilers and end up as the manufacturer of specialized HPC coprocessor cards (like PhysX) for things like
Stock Market analysis,
Petroleum exploration, and other GPGPU 'holy grails.'
The short of it is that, for right now, ATI holds the triple crown for image quality, performance-per-watt,
and framerate. So if you need these things, and you need them
right now (and you don't want to get there by merely lowering your graphics settings), the 5870 is the way to go. If you can afford to wait (or can't afford to switch), then by all means wait to see what NVIDIA releases (3xx in Q1 2010), or even whether
Larrabee is all that Intel says it will be (likely Q2 of 2010).
Like I said, right now might be a lousy time to be a GPU maker, but it's a
great time to be thinking about upgrading your graphics card...unless you're using AGP (that would be me
).
--Patrick
