it is not.

I totally agree with everything you said, plus the card is way, way too much in price for the slight increase in performance over the 5870.The gtx 480 is a good card, but I think Nvidia's drive to use brute force has fallen through this time. The philosophy of AMD-ATI regarding price/performance is one I respect better then Nvidia's dominate at any cost ethos. This is a blow to nvidia, and I do hope they realise that a piece of the humble pie has to be eaten by everyone. Look at ATI, before the 4000 series, they kept on being routinely crapped upon by Nvidia, but they worked through the problems, and came back bigger and stronger. ATI bit into the humble pie, and I believe Nvidia will also have to.
It's gearing up to fight Intel, and I don't think that will bode well at all for Nvidia, Intel has near infinite pockets, Nvidia does not. If they fight with both intel and AMD-ATI, on two fronts, a failure could be very costly to them.
To the subject of drivers, poppycock, as a 5750 user, my current drivers (10.2) are rock solid. 10.3 gives you even better performance, but I have yet to use them, drivers are annoying to install sometimes . For two and a half years I used a ati card previous to my 5750, and no driver ever caused a problem, or bad performance in a game. In fact as the drivers came out, the performance of my card was better.
Let's hope Nvidia can see that it's current tactics might not work for much longer, and adjust itself to contest ati.

No. I noticed. But looking at some other test results it's not too shabby. Maybe there will be a market for it. But I don't see me being in that market, personally.

'Like you just said the 5870 is $120 CDN cheaper than the GTX 480 and offers almost the same performance. As for the 5970 all Nvidia need is for ATI to drop the price to complete the fail.'
Expect a price drop on the 5970, but not on other ATI 5 series cards. IF ATI is to be believed, demand is still outstripping supply on the 5800 series, so a significant price drop is unlikely. But as the 5970 is quite expensive, and is probably the most desired card as of now,(I can safely say a lot of people are disappointed with the gtx 480 and are looking at ATI), a price drop to the gtx 480 level will just kill all need for a gtx 480. I don't doubt ATI is looking into this.
Also, I think GoG's quote system is buggy, it wouldn't let me post my reply with the quotes, I have no idea why. :(

yeah...
i wonder: can anyone calculate how much extra per hour of gameplay one has to pay using 480 in comparison to 5870?

Depends how much you have to pay per kw/h but its going to be pretty trivial per hour. May add up to a little per year but nothing thats going to break the bank.
For me it works out at 0.012 pence an hour left running for 12 hours a day everyday its £52.26 extra a year.

haha. thx. i would rep your post but you already have too many stars

Lukazthegreat I didn't think you were a repist (as close as that sounds to rapist I'm still going to make the lame joke).

Seems if you have nested quotes it drops the quoted text from the first source, while keeping the second. You then end up with an extra pair of opening quote blocks (square brackets) without a corresponding closing quote block.