We all need a wrap-up every now and then, and with NVIDIA's DirectX 11 line finally shipping en masse, now is a great time to talk about what's out here now and what's right around the corner. First let's start with the green team:

I'd be lying if I said that NVIDIA has been firing on all 8 cylinders lately. Fermi has been a very big problem for them, as we all expected. The GTX 480 shipped without all of it's performance potential, and it is still hot and power hungry. If you look at frames-per-watt, things are not good with Fermi. However, NVIDIA does still have the most stable drivers out there, and the fewest issues as far as compatibility is concerned. And don't forget that GTX 480 is the fastest GPU on the planet, at least most of the time. GTX 470 is a much better bet, providing good performance at a better price, however it is still hot and hungry.

That brings us to the new beauty of out NVIDIA's labs: the GTX 465. Don't let the product name fool you though, this is a GTX 470 with a couple of memory chips missing and a different BIOS, that's it. What's great about that is there has been a good bit of success unlocking the rest of the shaders on the card with a GTX 470 BIOS. Just install a 470 BIOS and test. You can't get the RAM that isn't there, but you'll get very close to the same performance as a 470 for a lot less. It is still a very hot and very power hungry card though, so if a quiet gaming rig is your hope, better expect some water cooling in your system.

The future of NVIDIA is quite bright though. Soon we'll see a GTX 460 which is a truly new card. If the leaked specs are anything to go by, we're looking at 240 cores, 768MB of RAM on a 192-bit bus, and only 180w of power. We don't know anything about clocks yet, but a lot of people are saying this is the next 8800GT card, meaning it should clock up very nicely. We could even see a solid 1GHz out of the core and 2GHz out of the shaders which would make this a beast indeed. If we can squeeze 1GHz out of the ram, or higher, we'll be well above the GTX 285 speeds, and probably well above the GTX 485 speeds as well. Heck, we might even break 470 speeds with a $230 card!

The other big topic around NVIDIA is the dual-GPU card built on the GTX 460 core. I'm not sure what to think about this one honestly. Two of those core would have 480 cores total, which is just as many as the GTX 480. If the card doesn't have insane clocks or a trick up its sleeve, it will be tough to compete with the 480, let alone the 5970. We'll just have to see what happens there.

All in all, NVIDIA is shaping up to have an eventful summer.

ATI, on the other hand, has been sitting back and enjoying a place that they rarely enjoy: top of the hill. The 5970 is the fastest card you can buy, while the 5850 is the best value of anything on the market once it's clocked up. The 5770 is another great buy for DirectX 11 performance on a budget, and the lower-end is still very attractive. Until NVIDIA releases lower-end Fermis, there is simply no competition right now. However, ATI's poor driver support and lack of features like CUDA and PhysX makes recommending them a tough spot.

I've been using a Radeon 5850 card for the past 4 months or so and I do kind of miss PhysX and CUDA. My favorite DVD manipulation program DVDFab just released CUDA support, and while my 4.0GHz Core i7 860 churns through two passes on a DVD in about 20 minutes, I'd still like to be faster. PhysX is missed less, since I've been playing mostly Aion and LOTRO lately, but I would still like to have it for the occasional game.

The worst part of ATI Radeon gaming is that I feel like there is a bit of a blur over the whole scene that doesn't show up on NVIDIA hardware. This is no doubt due to differences in their AA engines, and I simply think that NVIDIA's is better. It's a sharper image without jaggies, which is what we want. I'm also frustrated with the screen flash while the card changes modes. This happens even when accelerating Flash videos, which is just silly. ATI certainly cranks out the frames though and is the performance per watt winner.

ATI does have some new cards planned for later this year, but we're talking more like October time frame. These will be minor bumps, meaning somewhere around 15% faster probably, but no major new features that we've been told of yet. Until then, expect to see more insanely overclocked 5870's and 5850's, but nothing too exciting out of the red camp.

A last note on Intel graphics: Core i3 and Core i5 have plenty of power to run most applications, just not enough for gaming. I also come back to the idea of general-purpose GPUs, with Flash 10.1 acceleration and CUDA. We're seeing more and more applications sped up with GPUs, and that trend isn't going anywhere.

That's about it for the wrap-up. Things are good in GPU world.