This will probrobly be true.
There will be many 58xx users needing/wanting to upgrade,before gtx owners IMHO.
That isn't crystal clear, though. We have to see what games adopt high levels of tessellation, what impact the higher levels of tessellation have on IQ and FPS, and also features about those games that we are not talking about (the future games). Tessellation is not the only variable that will change in the sense of increased requirements on the cards, right? So it's not clear to me that just because 4XXGTX card users are better off in tessellation (for the moment, and likely after 69XX release but we'll see) that the 4XXGTX series is thus future-proof any more than the 6XXX series. Do you see what I mean?
If the want the same perfomance, it looks like AMD users will have to either lower their settings....or upgrade, compared to NVIDIA users:
http://www.geeks3d.com/20101028/test-asus-eah6870-1gb-review-direct3d-performances-part-4/
SubD11 show were the problem lies...look how AMD's performance tanks at 16x (normal) tessellation.
And the Lost Planet 2 bench mirrors the performance gap of HAWX2, comfirming AMD's lower performance.
And as a fun side fact.
Look at HAWX2.
98 FPS on a 5770.
That is a well implemented use of adaptive tessellation.
Just dosn't look impressive compared to NVIDIA's performance.
Hence why Fuddy had to spin some PR lies that far to many people took at face value...despite that the performance cleary showes how hollow his lies were.
There is no doubt in anyone's mind that currently AMD's cards aren't as good at tessellation as the Nvidia counterparts. So I'm not sure why you posted that. What I'm saying is, AMD's cards, dollar for dollar, play all current
games pretty well. Same with Nvidia. But the argument you seem to be making is that, necessarily, future games will require only more tessellation. You are isolating the variable that is 'tessellation' and using that to conclude that because the 4XX series is better at tessellation (now), that for sure the 4XX will be better in the future (if there are games that come out that make use of this advanced tessellation). But tessellation isn't the only fish to fry here, that's why I remain sceptical. I'm not arguing that AMD's tessellation is as good as Nvidia's, I'm merely arguing against the claim (with scepticism) that
necessarily, Nvidia's cards are more future proof than AMD's, because of better tessellation performance. You may turn out to be right (along with Scali), or I might.
It seems odd to me that a company like AMD would be involved with a number of developers (I mean, they have so much of the market you'd think gaming companies have an ongoing discourse with them) and thus know what future games are going to need to run, and then deliberately not deliver on the tessellator as Nvidia has. Do you catch my drift? If this wasn't the case, then gaming developers would be happy to have their games only playable on a much more limited number of computers (thus shrinking the potential market). A gaming company should want their game to run on as many computers as is possible, so that they will sell more copies, and thus make more money. If lots of gaming companies have told AMD "look, tessellation is the way forward, improve your performance if you want your card holders and enthusiasts to play these games at high settings" and AMD chose to ignore that - I mean, it's just absurd. It defies belief. So I prefer to think that there's something amiss about this 'great leap forward' that tessellation is made out to be, at least in the short term.