< $200 AMD / ATI ....on price / performance basis, best card here is the 6870
> $200 nVidia ....on price / performance basis, best card here is the 560 Ti (factory overclocked 900Mhz version has better value than stock card)
This has pretty much been the case over the last few generations of GFX cards that the upper end is owned by nVidia and the lower end by AMD / ATI. As for popularity,t Steam site gives a good idea of what peeps hitting their servers are using:
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/videocard/
-Overall, NVidia cards sit in 7 of the 8 top spots.
-Overall, AMD/ATI has 5 cards in the Top 20 (nVidia has 14).
-Out of the current generation cards (5xx and 69xx), the current market share (December) is as follows:
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 8.81%
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 4.35%
ATI Radeon HD 6950 3.53%
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 3.14%
ATI Radeon HD 6970 1.89%
DX10 cards comprise 61% of the cards hitting steam servers, DX11 only 32%.
For evaluating price / performance I look at dollars per frame and the table below highlights the two price category recommendations I made in the 1st paragraph. Guru3D uses the following games in their test suite, COD-MW, Bad Company 2, Dirt 2, Far Cry 2, Metro 2033, Dawn of Discovery, Crysis Warhead. Total fps (summing fps in each game @ 1920 x 1200) for the various options in parenthesis (single card / SL or CF) are tabulated below along with their cost in dollars per frame single card - CF or SLI:
$ 155.00 460-768 MB (314/592) $ 0.49 - $ 0.52
$ 155.00 6850 (371/634) $ 0.42 - $ 0.49
$ 170.00 6870 (434/701) $ 0.39 - $ 0.49
$ 220.00 6950 (479/751) $ 0.46 - $ 0.59
$ 240.00 6950 Frozr OC (484/759) $ 0.50 - $ 0.63
$ 205.00 560 Ti (455/792) $ 0.45 - $ 0.52
$ 320.00 6970 (526/825) $ 0.61 - $ 0.78
$ 215.00 560 Ti - 900 Mhz (495/862) $ 0.43 - $ 0.50
$ 340.00 570 (524/873) $ 0.65 - $ 0.78
$ 500.00 580 (616/953) $ 0.81 - $ 1.05
$ 725.00 6990 (762/903) $ 0.95 - $ 1.61
$ 750.00 590 (881/982) $ 0.85 - $ 1.53
That is for example, the 6870 costs $170, gets 434 fps in the game test suite in a single card configuration, at a cost of 39 cents per frame, and gets 701 in CF configuration costing 49 cents per fframe.