[Solved] GTX 260 or HD 5770 -- What brand? (edited subject)

Greetings Gurus,

I'm shopping for a new video card to put on my Christmas list, and I've narrowed it down to either the GTX 260 or 275, depending on how much she loves me.

Question 1: Is the difference in performance incredibly significant? I'm currently scraping every last bit of usefulness out of my GeForce 7950 GT, so either way I figure it will be an enormous leap forward and I'll be impressed. Just looking for most bang for buck with newer games.


Question 2: As if choosing the architecture weren't complicated enough, I'm staring down about 5 different brands of the same card, each a little different, and with surprisingly varied prices. I'm leaning in the direction of an Asus card, if for no other reason I'm running an Asus motherboard, and I know they've always been fairly reliable. What direction should I be looking in, brand-wise?

Thanks in advance for any clarification and recommendations you can offer.

EDIT: I was originally steering clear of ATI, as I have since my Radeon 8500. Research on Direct X 11 has me leaning toward an HD 5770 as a reasonable bang-for-buck card, so I altered the subject of the thread.

I think XFX (good warranty in the US) and EVGA are pretty standard for NVidia cards. I do have an Asus card though, and it works fine.

Either card will be a huge leap forward, so trust me, either way you will be happy. I don't think the difference is very large, as isn't the 275 mainly a die shrink? Maybe faster clocks too.

What CPU are you running? It could cause a bottleneck with a newer card. Look into ATi cards as well, an HD4890 or GTX 260 should be lovely.

To be more specific, ATi actually supports DX11 in their 5000 series cards, but as well known, there are no DX 11 games currently out.
The difference between DX10 and DX10.1 is minimal ( I believe).

Well, DX10.1 does help a bit when it's implemented, but that is so rare that its benefit is minimal.

Well, I personaly have had very little issue with ATI driver stability. Over the past few years, I have had very few crashes due to the drivers alone. So I wouldn't worry too much about that. The 260 is probably a little faster now (in current games), though recent beta drivers show the 5000s many be going up in performance soon (but that remains to be seen). And finally, the wildcard, DX11. It looks really good, lots of potential, but if a game you want doesn't use it or your 5770 is too slow by then, then DX11 will be useless. Just some things to consider.

So DirectX 11 support, lower power consumption, cheaper, and the potential for improved performance with evolving drivers.

I've been happy with NVidia, and the 260 GTX looks like a nice card, but I think the scale is definitely leaning toward the HD 5770.

The benchmarks I've seen only have the 260GTX slightly ahead of the 5770 anyway. It probably won't be a hugely noticeable difference on less demanding games, will it?

Looks like your leaning the right way . brockh is about the only one here who is making any sense, all the others read as if they are trying to give advice on something they dont really know too much about.
Its really quite a simple question with a very simple answer. DX11 brings too many advantages to be ignored, provided you are running an Operating system that is DX11 capable of course. Vista can be updated to DX11 and W7 supports it out of the box.
If you are still running XP and have no plans, budget or wish to change then there is little point even considering DX11. However if you are DX11 capable then in my opinion you would be mad not to get the DX11 card. The two cards are very similar performance wise and driver updates should take the 5770 past the 260 performance wise. If you are using a big resolution the 128 bit interface may be a cause to consider the 260 instead but certainly up to 1680x1050 i wouldnt let it bother you.
Anything i havent covered please ask.

Mactronix

In all the excitement, I forgot one of the principle focus points of the thread!

Is there a particular manufacturer I should steer toward or away from? Asus makes a 5770, Sapphire's been around a while if I'm not mistaken.

Which ones are the good ones, or does it not really matter like with the Nvidia cards?

impressive dialogues .

Sold! Asus HD 5770 it is.

Thanks for the help everyone, I was in the tall grass.