Short story: The Radeon 5770 is the way to go at the moment …

• Asus built Radeon 5770 is now £107.66 inc from eBuyer (http://bit.ly/6LjQ97)
• The direct competition is the pricier (£132.34) GTX260 ,   (http://bit.ly/84cLc1)

nvidia GTX260

ati radeon 5770

Notes:

1. Nvidia has bet it all on CUDA, which IMHO is a load of bollocks. Basically they’ve kind of lost out on the graphics side of things.
http://bit.ly/7elBC3. BTW: Trefis suggests that a DCF based price for NVDA is $12.25, though I think it’s lower still. Discrete desktop GPU’s make up only 12.42% of NVDA market cap.

2. ATI holds the current performance crown.

3. The Radeon 5770 is the current generation mainstream card (Hardwarecanucks review: http://bit.ly/8Mjbv0). The last generation top-end is the Radeon 4890 which is a little bit faster than the 5770. The primary difference between the 5770 and the 5870 is the memory bandwidth.