ATI's profit margin per card must be more than NVidia's so from the business side of things, ATI won this generation's war as well.
Nvidia has been working on this card since like 2002...they came up with a brand new design which if you read about the cards back in march 2004, it is the biggest leap in graphics rendering for quite some time. ATI struggled at the beginning of this market and is just now getting up to the point where you can get nice clean benchmarks. For the first few months drivers were severely an issue with ATI and therefore really hendered their cards abilities...but even still they aren't the greatest.
Clearly Nvidia has paved the way for some amazing graphics processing in the future and ATI so far is just following the lead. In the case of the 9 series vs FX then yeah hands down ATI has the clearer lead.
Above all, like I've said a million different times....everyones system is different.
And until you and I can get the latest hardware on both AMD and Intel platforms, then test multiple cards with various memory types etc...etc... then technically you never know which card is top.
Some benches go in favor of nvidia, some go in favor of ATI.
Agreed that all these cards deliver mind boggling performance and it's to the point where people are getting just plain anal over really simplistic crap that shouldn't be argued over.
Overall every single time it comes down to who you like best. Don't think I've ever come across someone who's followed the cards closely and chose nvidia sometimes and ATI's other.
For the most part either people are nvidia or ATI. Unless ATI comes out with a card that just dominates over Nvidias I'll probably stick with Nvidia. They have much better driver support for their cards IMO
Besides.....this thread isn't about nvidia vs ati.....it's ati vs ati on this particular occasion.