Despite what you say, i disagree that the level of physics nvidias PhysX provides us with can be achieved by a good CPU without being at much expense to performance. If the CPU could do all this real time fluid simulation and the rest of it, why has it never been pulled off to look and behave even half as good as PhysX does ?
I'll pretend for a minute that CPU's can do the task just as well without sacrificing much gameplay performance, that's great and all, but i can still only get it by using a PhysX card. It is essentially pointless to argue whether the CPU can or can not do the task, the fact of the matter is
the only way to experience PhysX like physics is by using a nVidia card whether this is because only GPU's are powerful enough or nVidia pays all these devs to restrict the realisticness of there in game physics does not matter, the fact remains the same.
And zmatt, you are talking about only ever basing your decision off Price/Performance, if this was the same for me i too would of got a 5870. But it isn't, i like what PhysX gives me, and i like what CUDA does, and i actually prefer nvidia over ATI as i'm sure many other people do. Whether all these features are cons or not is again, totally irrelevent, i couldn't get them by getting an ATI card or by getting a better CPU.
Subjective due to ignorance. The bit with computers is everything can be quantified however you want. You can make a very good case that a 4870 simply is not fast enough with benchmarks. You can also argue the price/performance ratio of any particular card/chip.anything is insufficient to warrant buying it. All you need is the numbers, and when you are dealing with a very number oriented topic everything else is pretty pointless. Also anyone who has that kind of money really doesn't need our help. They should go ahead and spend it on the biggest parts and make us feel bad about ourselves.
Also, stop posting on a forum and go eat some dinner or watch some prime time tv. It's 3 am here, but you're far from done.
But for the quantitative data to mean anything to the end user, they must have the correct subjective views. If i define 'fast enough' for me as 5fps, or that i don't care about benchmark, the 4870 immediately becomes fast enough for every game out there, even when you look at the quantitative data. You can look at quantitative data and say "This is fastest" and on the inverse "This is slowest" but you can not say "This is fast enough for me" or "This is to slow for me" to be able to provide those two statements as answers a subjective view on the performance required must be gave.