Top Mainstream and High-end Graphics Cards

Seem like solid choices, although with AMD and nvidia staggering their price/performance parts to some extent, competition doesn't seem overly cut-throat at the present time.

Personally I'll look to upgrade to a GTX 460 1Gb SLI setup, while my GTX 280's and waterblocks still retain some value in the "pre-loved" market. My secondary system already has current gen AMD graphics so no big cash outlays until I see how the next generation shakes out.
The value of the upper echelon ($800+) multi-gpu probably are OTT for single monitor gaming, but if you're going Eyefinity or 3D Surround....then yeah, they look gooooooooood

Until i see some benchmark for Crysis 2 i won't buy anything new. Also the second gen (aka "tweaked") card that AMD wants to release this year look tasty.

I won't be upgrading for crysis 2. I won't even BUY the game. Their "move" to consoles because of piracy is going to cause more piracy than ever in the PC community. The same thing happened to IW. But I will probably move to a GTX 460 from my 260.

It's really difficult for me to move out of three 4830's in crossfireX, they deliver amazing performance and I bet they can take Crysis 2 with ease...Maybe when Direct X11 becomes the standard as it is Direct X10 right now, I'll make my move.

I won't be upgrading for a while because I bought an XFX Radeon 5850 last April and I couldn't be more satisfied, although I must say DirectX 11 gamer are rather thin on the ground at the moment. I expect Crysis 2 will work fine for me.

@princeton Crytek's move to consoles causes more PC piracy? How so?

I have 4870X2, I don't see anything (in the near future), that would make me want to upgrade. It will be AT LEAST a year (and maybe more), until we see anything that would really NEED DX11. As PC's are no longer the dominant market, the importance of DX10 -> parts is nearly non-existent. Everything is designed for 360/PS3 in mind, everything is more or less lousy ports, that work badly on PC's as the testing, which PC games really need because of different configurations, is mainly omitted. Sad, but true.

Next month I'm going with a SLI GTX 460 setup. Can't wait to see what kind of benchmarks I get with those!

A game with a dumbed down setting(new york) to accommodate console hardware,low viewdistances(skyscrapers will be used to render less by blocking) and it isn't a fully sandbox game. When you see in their trailer a car get thrown that is definitely placed to hit an object it makes you wonder if Crytek has forgotton what sanbox really means. Do you think that's going to make people want to buy the game? No.

I plan to upgrade my GTX 260 to a 1GB GTX 460 as soon as Newegg has any EVGA or XFX cards in stock. I'll be happy to finally play Crysis at 1920x1200 on max settings instead of at 1280x800. Later on, I'll pop in another one for some sweet SLI + Physx 3 GPU combo.

For all of you saying that DX11 is irrelevant, you need to rethink your position. The adoption rate of DX11 is leaps and bounds ahead of the adoption rate of DX10. There are a lot of developers who are going to skip straight to DX11 from DX9. There are also quite a few games that use DX11 features right now. Battlefield: Bad Company 2, BattleForge, Just Cause 2, Dirt 2, Aliens vs. Predator, Metro 2033, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat, and when released, Crysis 2, Civilization V, and Medal of Honor.

The consoles have another 3-5 years in their lifespans. As the consoles continue to stagnate and limit video games, developers will have to find an outlet to push technology forward, and the only place they can do that is on the PC.

My HD 5870 will hold me over for a while. Just came from 3870x2 and if things slow down too much I'll add another 5870 to keep me going but I perceive that will take a while for that to happen.

Right, I'll do this too, I think waiting for benchmarks is far better than buying a card specifically to play a game without knowing if it can max it out! I'm actually running on two 5700 series ATI cards in crossfire with my core i7 and they can max out crysis at 720p using 4x AA on DX10, but I'd like to play crysis2 on 1080p all maxed out, AA is not important, so I think a single gtx470/gtx480 will do the trick at 40+ fps, since crytek said that crysis2 will require less system sources than crysis, but I'll not like to waste money, if my ATIs can make this game to run at 1080p with no AA but maxed out than it will be ok!

I'm waiting until there are more 1G versions of the GTX 460, maybe an EVGA model. I'm running 2 Asus 9800GT Ultimates in SLI right now and have been pleased with the performance, but for DX11 I'll need a GTX 460 at least. I'm not waiting for Crysis 2 (I could care less). Besides more 1G versions I'm looking for some rebates, but that wont happen until we get closer to the holidays. So I'm going to wait a few more months, after all it'll only help my wallet not hurt it.

Do all Fermi cards scale better with SLI than crossfire? Have their been any tests on the 460?

Sorry for being off-topic.

Crysis 2 is going to appeal to the same fan base who bought Crysis and Crysis: Warhead. As you probably know, PC gamers are snobbish toward console gamers. So they will tend to buy the PC version rather than the console version (or pirate the PC version).

When the hype machine runs at full tilt, do you think people will concentrate on things like lesser freedom? They will put graphics and gameplay first and definitely queue up to buy the game. So I don't really think opening up Crysis 2 to the consoles is going to have much of an impact on the PC version sales.

Tesselation is an obvious reason. Do you think it's because of ATi's drivers as well? I'm looking to go Crossfire in the near future and I don't see myself buying a Fermi because I already have an HD 5850.

It adds to the scaling difference it is nowhere near the main reason. Here's a review including benchmarks of around ten games that don't feature tessellation. Crossfire still scales to a lesser degree

Given that single card performance between AMD and nvidia is fairly close, I'd say that it's a given that Crossfire drivers are the key issue, especially since a number of games benchmarked do not appear to be bottlenecked by frame buffer

Why should Crossfire's scaling in relation to SLI affect your decision to add a second HD 5850 ?
Surely the object of the exercise would be to ensure a good gameplay experience, which CF'ed 5850's would provide. The fact that someone else's SLI setup pushes a few more pixels than your intended solution should not have any relevance.

Yes, the SLI bully kicks CF in the nuts and laughs in his face

Yes, Yes and Yes

on FFXIV:
They did release some information about the recommended specs recently - a 5830 coupled with a hexacore CPU is what they are saying is the best. I don't know - since the information has been sketchy all beta. There is a thread on Zam forums about it, if you are interested.

I do know that the XIV benchmark ran pretty smoothly on my 5850 and scored reasonably well - but then again the benchmark *ran smoothly* on my old GT220 as well but scored horribly, so I feel your pain about the benchmark being basically useless for testing. I guess we'll see.