Whether or not the GTX480 is worth your hard-earned funds will boil down to practical concerns. Across our gaming tests (synthetic benchmarks excluded), we generally saw a 15 - 20% performance gap, with the GTX 480 sitting ahead for most of them.

On the dollars per frame front, its rating is actually not too shabby. At a resolution of 2560-by-1600, with anti-aliasing activated, we averaged about $11.56 per frame-per-second (FPS) on the GTX 480, as compared to $11.41 on the 5870, and $13.18 on the overclocked 5870. On a strict price-per-frame metric, the 5870 is the better deal -- by about 15 cents.

That minute gap starts to get quite a bit wider when you factor in your monthly electric bill. Saddled with the GTX 480, our system utilized 140W of power when idle -- the 5870 used 106W, the overclocked 5870 used 118. Under load, we saw a whopping 365W with the GTX 480, versus 256W and 276W with the 5870 and the overclocked 5870, respectively. Translated into watts-per-FPS, the 5870 is about 21% more efficient than the GTX 480. Its overclocked sibling is about 16% more efficient. Even if you were willing to eat the 15 cent price-per-frame measurement, the noticeably higher power consumption rate will ultimately take its toll.

Fun Fact: When we pushed the cards during our FurMark test, we saw 460W at load on the GTX 480, versus a maximum of 336 on the 5870. Again, Furmark isn't a realistic measurement, but it's always an interesting number to keep in mind.

All things considered, there's a lot to like here. The Fermi architecture has a lot to offer, particularly where anti-aliasing or tessellation are concerned. The 5870 does have a considerable advantage over the GTX 480 in a number of places. It's overall power draw is lower, it often delivers comparable performance for less, and some perks -- powering 3 displays from a single GPU -- have yet to be addressed by Nvidia. As it stands, until the more games start to take advantage of the technology that Fermi hopes to offer, we'd advise weighing the performance, power, and price benefits before handing over your credit card.