This whole thing is making it amazingly difficult to choose.

I was fairly confident I'd be going nVidia this generation, as I'd been predicting that the 69xx would disappoint compared to the 58xx series what with the unexpected transition back to the larger node. However, the performance of the 6970 at very high resolutions (2560 and Eyefinity res') is absolutely stellar and in many cases, as far as I've seen, at or above 580 performance, as is multi-card scaling. Further, "modern" games with heavy use of geometry, tesselation etc seem to favour the 6970 again (a la DiRT, Stalker COP, Metro), which suggests that the 6970 may well be a better future investment.

All this means that for me the 6970 is likely to outperform the 580 at the resolutions I play at, while costing about $250 less than the 580. Was not expecting this at all.