After publishing our look at the new GeForce GTX 460 we had several requests for an article that quickly compared the relevant NVIDIA and AMD options from top to bottom for the enthusiast PC gamer. I threw together some graphs comparing the $200 cards, $300 cards and $400+ cards from both vendors and added some of our own analysis to help gauge the market as we see it today.

While the GeForce GTX 460 showed power consumption close to that of the Radeon HD 5830 while offering better performance, the GeForce GTX 470 and 480 use a dramatic amount of additional power to get the performance results we showed you above. While the HD 5850 is slower in our testing than the GTX 470, it does use 33% less power than the NVIDIA option and the HD 5870 uses 44% less power than the GTX 480. These are not small gaps by any stretch and the fact that the HD 5870 uses 25% less power than the GTX 470 mainstream option indicates that point further.