I don't know what the fastest card is, but this card is all that & a bag of chips. I am interested to see how it is doing after a couple months since some of the 7900 series failures were after a little use. So far people who have had this card longer than me have absolutely nothing but praise for it.
People all around the net say "unless you have high def your not going to see any difference in the high end cards"
I say that's a little on the false side, it's got more to do with people not getting attention because they have a two or three thousand dollar monitor.
When you have huge monitors set to ultra-high resolutions & they aren't being driven correctly, you see a difference because lesser cards can't drive that type of set-up. When you have a smaller monitor & it's set to lower resolutions it takes more to drop the performance, a lot more. In other words; if you have a dell 30" high def monitor running ultra high resolutions, you will see a performance hit in busy areas with lots of fire & traffic, animated water, trees, butt loads of players ETC even with high end cards, where a smaller monitor running less resolution won't take that hit, you'll keep flying right along with your frame rate maxed out because the monitor isn't driving the card that hard.
My 7800GT could not keep my frame rate maxed out with the 1024 texture pack all sliders on high detail; the 7900GTX did much better before it started to stumble, then it began showing signs of artifacting & mini-freezes. I can't hardly bog this 7950 down anywhere in AH, it chews it up & spits it out.
edit: Oh yeah, btw this card is running 1-gig of video memory; 512MB X 2
