I am not a fan boy of either Nvidia or ATI, my two current systems are a mix of everything.
Intel/Nvidia in one and AMD/ATI in the other, the later being my main gameing rig.
I would concider my AMD/ATI rig to be about as fast a gameing system as you can build, PhII at 4.0ghz (I have found the Corei7 to just be anoying to work with) and 4 4890's at 1ghz. Before you make the point, yes I know CFX allmost never works, but when it does its amazing and from working with my Nvidia box runnning 3 GTX260's, it works a hell of a lot more then Tri SLI does.
I look at the current gen this way.
The 4XXX line of cards caught Nvidia totaly offguard, the GT200 line of cards were not as fast as the world and ATI expected and to be honest gave me a lot of HD2900XT flashbacks, that being a MASSIVE GPU that is not as fast as it looks to be on paper.
I am by no means saying that the GTX2XX cards are slow or anything, but they are not as fast as I expected. Nivida fans boys will say that "its faster then ATI". But it SHOULD BE, Nvida had a near 1 year lead over ATI (8800GTX launch 11/06 vs 11/07 for the 3870) and now comeing into the DX11 gen they are going to be close to 3 months behind ATI, maybe more.
Sure maybe Nvidia has not lost much market share, but are they makeing that much money off these cards ? I don't have anything to prove how much each GPU costs ATI or Nvidia, but based only off the size of the GPU it's self, I expect Nvida is not makeing as much, sure 55nm helped a bit, but selling a large pizza for the same cost as your main competor is selling a small pizza just does not seem like the best way to make money.
As for this ongoing idea that Nvidia has the high end on lock, I am not sure that is the truth.
I guess if you are saying that the high end is one single card, then yes Nvidia has the fastest single GPU on the planet. However the real high end is in SLI and CFX, and there things start to turn for the green camp.
For the high end you can put 2 GTX295's in Quad SLI, 3 GTX285's in Tri SLI or 4 4890's in CFX. I myself don't have any GTX295's to bench to text what I am going to say next, but I suspect that 4 4890's will distory 2 GTX295's and 3 GTX285 at super high res, which is the only time you would need this kind of power.
I know that if you are thinking of that kind of a setup the cost is not going to really matter much but incase it does.
4 x $184.99 (50mhz overclocked 4890 on the Egg) = 739.96
3 x $314.99 (stock clocked GTX285 from a brand i would never buy on the Egg) = 944.97
2 x $529.99 (stock clocked GTX 295 on the Egg) = 1059.98
So the top Nvidia setup will cost you 320.02 more then the top ATI setup, both setups are totaly totaly pointless, and really need more driver and game dev support to be worth the money. But as Nvidia fan boys allways have to point out that Nvidia is what you want if you simply want the most power I had to point this out... ATI currently has the mostpowerfull setup you can build and it costs you 320.02 less then what Nvidia can offer.
All you Nvidia fan boys should spend less time hateing ATI for makeing the Nvidia stuff you bough less overpriced and more time infront of your Green Team shrines praying that Nvidia can build a good DX11 GPU by the end of the year.
My end point is that price drops are good for EVERYONE that is planning to ever buy a video card .. ever. ATI has done something amazing, givin us the ablity to play games at high res with everything turned on, on a video card that costs under $200. The 4870, regardless of your feelings on ATI, changed the way video cards will be priced from now on. High end cards for under $200, theres really nothing not to like about that.
Not totaly off topic BUT as some one brought it up
DX10.1 also never took off even years after it was introduced either. When you start getting into the non bench elements, you shouldn't forget to mention nV's clearly superior IQ to go along with the rest- that applies for every game that can use AF.
Nvidia is soon to launch some DX10.1 parts, its a steping stone twords DX11, sure Nvidia is REALLY late to the DX10.1 party, thus meaning they will be rather late to the DX11 party as well. Allso DX10.1 is not useless, anyone who has played FarCry 2 with the DX10.1 patch on a ATI card knows this.
