[...]With GT 430, NVIDIA has basically surrendered to AMD on performance. In a very unusual manner, you won’t find NVIDIA extoling the virtues of the card’s performance over AMD’s lineup. Even in our press briefing there was little said about gaming performance beyond the fact that it’s faster than the GT 220 and that NVIDIA believes it’s a meaningful upgrade over Intel’s IGP products due to their greater compatibility with games. Instead NVIDIA is largely selling this card upon its virtues as an HTPC card, or as NVIDIA likes to call the broader market segment: Digital Media PCs.
NVIDIA’s ace in the hole is that they have 1 thing right now that AMD doesn’t: a complete 3D stereoscopy strategy. On the hardware side this is due to the fact that GF104/106/108 all have support for HDMI 1.4a, which is necessary for full resolution 3D television/Blu-Ray and is an advantage afforded to them by the fact that AMD’s products are too old to incorporate support for HDMI 1.4a. On the other side NVIDIA has a coherent 3D strategy, with 3D Vision hardware for PC monitors, and thanks to the HDMI support for sending Blu-Ray 3D to TVs (and later this year, 3D gaming through 3D TV Play). And of course NVIDIA has bitstreaming audio capabilities for compressed lossless audio formats, bringing them up to par with AMD's audio offerings and a step up over the GT 200 series which could only support LPCM.
The long and the short of matters is that for gaming performance NVIDIA is already beat; as we’ll see even a Radeon HD 5570 DDR3 can confidently beat the GT 430, never mind the Radeon HD 5670 which can currently be found for even cheaper than the GT 430 once you factor in rebates.
