I never buy the current top of the line GPUs, i usually upgrade to stuff that's in the 150-200 Euro range. The cool thing about frequent upgrades is that the previous series drops in price.
When i got my i7 rig last year i went with an Ati 4870 after a lot of years of having nVidia cards, because as Robtek said it was the best bang for the buck. That particular card was deffective and gave up the ghost last Christmas, but thanks to the 3 year warranty i got a 4890 for free, which i still use now.
I think i won't upgrade again for about a year or until the current DX11 cards drop to the 200 Euro price range, whatever happens first. I don't mind running SoW in less than full detail, as long as SoW at medium looks better than IL2 at full i'm satisfied. The good thing is that Ati is gearing up for the 6xxx series GPUs so i might be able to get a 58xx in about 6 months for a good price.
I don't know about the nVidia 4xx series. They are obviously very powerful GPUs as well, but differences in architecture suggest that unless heavy tesselation is involved the performance gain in comparison to Ati cards is not enough to justify the extra pice, increased temperatures and power consumption, at least for now. When the Fermi cards got released, their single-GPU cards were priced almost as high and ran almost as hot or hotter than the dual-GPU Ati ones and that begs the question "if i'm paying dual-GPU money and having dual-GPU temps and consumption, why not actually buy a dual-GPU card and get the performance benefit that goes with it?". Of course advances have been made, nVidia released more affordable models and worked on the temp issues, but i think they were clearly overtaken during this season. I hope they bounce back, not because i take any side in the Ati/nVidia fanboy wars, but because competition among them means better prices for me.
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