HD 5850 VS GTX 470Follow

I would upgrade your CPU while you were at it... Since that means your MB, I would get DDR3-1600+

And then I would make sure my MB supported SLI and get a GTX460

Then I would SLI now or later on.

I'd hold off on the next-gen series cards until they get the drivers fixed. Lots of problems with DX9 and back on alot of them (problems with both FFXI and FFXIV on the 400's for one example, but there are other games as well).

A 4850 can play a lot of games still--even the upcoming FF14 will run on it. And yes, I know this for a fact, it's not just because I got decent marks on the benchmark on my E8400 with a 512MB 4850 in XP Pro.

If the game you want to play runs like crap on it, then that's another story. Otherwise, I would hold off a little longer to give the market some time for drivers to mature and then compare them on equal footing.

Raist

Edit:
Might want to bookmark this site. They are regularly testing hardware in various environments:
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2010-gaming-graphics-charts-high-quality/benchmarks,111.html



Edited, Aug 26th 2010 6:06pm by BDHERTZER

Personally I would probly suggest looking at more than one benchmark score before choosing to drop either ATI or nVidia for the other. Most rigs I have seen tested score higher with single 5870s or 5970s than the GTXs; especially in real world tests, however with SLI nVidia still takes the cake for multi-card rigs over ATI's Crossfire in almost all benchmarks I have seen in recent months.