At the end of the day you have to take into consideration what works best for you. The significance of your decision should be of 4 key factors: Price, performance, scalability, and features. While Nvidia held onto its performance crown in many areas, the Radeon HD 3870 did very well against it and even beat it in several situations.
So if you have cards that are comparable in performance, then you have to compare prices or more exactly ask yourself the question - What are you getting for the price? There is a new leader for price for the amount of frames per second: Radeon HD 3850.
All of the midrange cards have something to offer. The Nvidia GeForce 8800GT holds more wins than losses so it is still the best performing midrange graphics card. The Radeon HD 3850 is the best value for the performance you get. Looking at its performance in CrossFire it makes for a very compelling system at $360 which is only $60-80 more than a single GeForce 8800GT. The AMD HD 3800 cards scale better overall. Nvidia stated that only its high end cards will be able to utilize 3-way SLI. AMD on the other hand will scale 2, 3, and 4-way CrossFire. We will have to test how much extra performance each card adds compared to the cost, but at least AMD is offering that option.
The last item to weigh into your decision is the feature set of each card. AMD and Nvidia both have hardware video decoding, but AMD offers full VC-1 hardware decode. According to HighDefDigest.Com, the majority of HD DVD titles (87%) use the VC-1 codec while 10% use H.264. For HD DVD owners, this makes the AMD Universal Video Decoder more valuable than the Pure Video solution from Nvidia.
Another feature AMD has over the Nvidia GeForce 8800GT is full support for DirectX10.1. While DX10.1 has some promising improvements for game development in terms of tighter blending and filtering formats, a set of specified multi-sampling antialiasing (MSAA) patterns and the inclusion of custom filters, the biggest advances may come through the use of extensions from shader model (SM) 4.0 to SM4.1 and more significantly from the adoption of techniques using cube map arrays for effects like global illumination. You need to keep in mind that some of these will not be implemented in the short term.
Of all of the cards, the value and overall performance title goes to the AMD Radeon HD 3870. It has enough horsepower to play all the games currently on the market very well. Purchasing any of the midrange cards will not leave you short in terms of performance, but the AMD solutions and especially the HD 3870 offers the most for the most bang for the buck.
