It doesn't take long to see that I'm mostly an NVIDIA guy when it comes to GPUs. However, ATI is making a huge splash with their DirectX 11 line-up. They've totally taken over a market that doesn't even exist until next week, with cards ranging from $130 all the way up to $400

Click on the picture above to get Anand's excellent write-up.

If DirectX 11 is all you're worried about, and that's a lot to be honest, then the ATI cards are the only way to go for now. NVIDIA's GT300 cards won't be out en masse until late this year, possibly early next year. They are also aiming for a top to bottom launch like ATI has, however they are expecting their parts to perform around 15% faster than ATI's, I'd imagine. This is similar to the lead they have today, pay a little more for their cards and get more FPS.

What's very interesting to me is that ATI slotted the 5770 right under the GTX 260 Core 216, both in terms of performance and price. The price premium is only $20 to move up to the 260, and while being an older card, it can still beat up on the 5770 pretty well. It seems to me that ATI is playing DirectX 11 as their only selling point, similar to how they pushed DirectX 10.1, and that's just not enough in my opinion. NVIDIA has always had a strong group of fundamentals like image quality, driver support, Linux support, and stability that ATI still has a lot of catching up to do on. NVIDIA also has PhysX, which is becoming just as important as super-sets of DirectX, in my opinion.

So while I am very ready to upgrade my aging 8800GT for a new card, I'm still in a holding pattern. Thanks to the consoles, I haven't run into a game that really required a lot more power than this highly-overclocked guy, and until I see NVIDIA's DirectX 11 line-up, I'm not going to jump on-board with ATI's. We can only hope that because of their lead, ATI will be able to lower their pricing enough to combat the a fore mentioned deficiencies.