Okay its a long question title for sure.

I'm looking for a new video card (yes,SU is not a page for that, but wait). I've been a loyal NVidia customer ever since, now using a 8600gts. Old but still somewhat good, its a bit slow though. I want an upgrade because 8600gts wont support better vdpau and new features.

I checked out the prices and the documents, I would need a GTX260 card. Which costs ..well.. a lot. ATI performs much better for that price. (At least on every test it outperforms GTX260).

However, as far as I know there is no gpu accel with ATI. The things you can use is DXVA only, no other method. Could you correct me out there? Will be there a gpu accel for ATI also? Or is there one available? (DXVA is not bad, but kinda slow compared to NVIdia's CUDA.) What about openCL? How does ATI support that? (I'm talking about the 5850 ATI card at the minute, I would buy that instead of the NVidia.)