Hey y'all, 
 
I'm looking to buy a graphics card, and I'm leaning towards the GTX 275, but I'm not completely sure.  I hear ATI's 4890 is very comparable, and I've read that it's best to compare the graphics cards based on what games you intend to play. 
 
Fair enough, I know a lot of games are built with specific architectures in mind and will run better, or have been optimized for certain engines, etc.
 
I'm basically looking for a directory that lists games and what company's videocard they'll run better on.  Does anybody know a good resource, or is this a silly question?  If there's not such a thing, does anybody know which graphics cards the following games/engines would run better on? 

• Mass Effect (or anything on Unreal Engine 3)
• Far Cry 2
• Crysis
• Wolfenstein
• Supreme Commander
• Fallout 3
• Bioshock
• Empire: Total War

I have no idea where you could look for a list like that. 

I have a NVIDIA Geforce 9800 GT and all the games you are listing work perfectly with all settings maxed out and no fps loss.
 
I am no video card know it all but you at least might get some idea from the model I have when you make your final decision.
 
Cheers.

Fact: Either of those graphics cards will handle all of those games on maximum settings, with little discernible difference. The small differences in theoretical performance numbers have little impact on actual performance. 
 
The only place you would see a difference is if you were playing at a super-high resolution, where the larger amount of vram would help performance. 
 
Get the cheaper one. NOTHING stays bleeding-edge for long, so there is no point in paying that premium. 
 
Just for reference, I have a MOBILE version of the gtx 260, and it plays all those games superbly. A desktop version will be much faster.

As has been said, most card vs card comparisons will only apply to theoretical numbers games will work if your card is the reccomended specs, ram, OS, processor all have a quite large affect on this.

Thanks for the replies.  I realize they'll both handle the latest titles quite well, I'm just kind of skeptical of how much they will.  I just recently updated my computer's motherboard, processor and RAM but was underwhelmed by the performance improvement I got.  I have a Core 2 Duo E8400 3.0ghz, ASUS P5Q Pro, and 4gbs of G.SKILL DDR2 5-5-5-15.  The graphics card I've got right now is an 8800GT 512mbs.  It's obviously what's holding me back, but even then, it's proving to be a bit more of a bottleneck I thought it'd be. 
 
I'm currently playing Mass Effect on high textures at 1680x1050.  In areas not populated at all I can get up to the low-50s for frames, but during combat it can drop down to the 20s.  Also, I got all the upgrades to my machine primarily just so I could finally play Oblivion with everything turned on, and was disappointed that I wasn't able to do that with a stable framerate.  With high textures on, at 1680x1050, I would still get a framerate in the low-40s in dense forests or the Marketplace.  I know that it's not the best optimized game out there though, but still, I thought I'd be able to overcome that with the setup I had.  By the way, as a side-question, I read that Fallout 3 actually runs better than Oblivion because it's optimized so incredibly well.  Is that true?
 
@dark_magot + torus:
you both give me hope that this will be indeed a huge improvement, since even you, dark_magot, on a 9800GT runs those games really well.

Anyways, think I'll get a big performance improvement with either of the previously mentioned cards?

I'm on a GTX260 core 216 and I still get framerate drops in UT3 (edit - below 60fps, doesn't go below 40fps, but it definitely spends a good amount of time around 50fps) with graphics maxed at 1680x1050.  Oblivion runs very smooth even with lots of mods, but will still chop up for loading (probably because I have several GB of extra textures going on).
 
I would suggest not throwing too much money at hardware just to play games a little better.  What CPU were you running before?

"What CPU were you running before? "

" @Diamond said:

"What CPU were you running before? "

I had a 3.4ghz Pentium 4 w/ hyper-threading.  The dual-core helped a huge deal.  The GTX260 core 216 gets a lot of praise.  It's treated you well? "

"My previous was a Pentium 4 3.0 /w HT, I'm surprised you aren't ecstatic moving to a E8400, that's the same chip I got."

"Going higher than a GTX275 isn't going to be worth it, especially with DX11 cards around the corner.  I'd suggest waiting anyways because there's bound to be price drops."

DirectX 11 is supposed to ship in October, right?  Does that mean we'll see a new line of DirectX 11 cards around then? "

The reduced price is appealing, but I think I'm drooling too much right now to wait much longer.  Thanks for the help, Diamond.