Lol I made my previous comment before I read the article. I see now you compared ATI's current generation GPU with Nvidia's last generation.
I've actually made this comparison myself. I had a GTX 280 fail on me, and while it was (is ) in for warranty repairs, decided to give 2 Crossfired 5770s a shot (because that was about the same price as 1 GTX 285). The game is World of Warcraft.
What I noticed (other than higher frame rates from the Crossfired cards) was that transparent objects looked better on the Radeon cards. Frankly, I put this down to DX11 and WoW's ability to take advantage of at least that much of it (but little more). However, the AA on the 5770s was terrible - and this is on a CRT (Sony FW900, 1920x1200) at the same settings as the GTX 280. I haven't tried it yet on my LCD, since LCD panels have even more trouble with AA than CRTs I'm thinking the AA might not be fixable in WoW whit the 5770s. I'd have to live with jagged lines that should be straight.
Otherwise, both pictures are excellent, except the GTX 280 produces a better blended overall background. I'm talking things like large fields of grass, walls, trees - these things look more real because the individual segments they are rendered from are better blended.
Ambient Occlusion makes a bit of a difference, too. AO gives current games a bit more depth. Last generation Nvidia cards have this, current generation ATI cards don't.
My conclusion (from obviously very limited experience) - if frame rates and DX11 are the most important thing to you, for about $300-350 go 2 5770s in CrossfireX. If overall visual quality is what is most important, go for the GTX 285 - scratch that, you can get a 470 for that, there's no reason to buy a 285 anymore, unless the price drops way down.
WoW's graphics are described as "CPU intensive"; I imagine that games that rely more heavily on the video adapter will show up their visual quality differences even more.
ATI, in my opinion, has spent a couple of years taking the recent AMD philosophy of trying to keep the price down and compete that way rather than doing it by keeping their technology competitive. I am glad to see a shift in their thinking with the Phenom II series and hope that trend continues in both their CPU and GPU product development. We consumers do need price competition, and I don't want AMD to go unrecognized for helping keep prices down, as much as they have, but Intel and Nvidia respectively need to be technologically challenged. Without AMD and ATI striving to overtake them rather than just keep up with them, they have no real competition.
Ah, for the good ol' days when Matrox was in the mix.
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