Over the past couple of days several benchmarks pitting two Nvidia Fermi cards against ATI Evergreens have surfaced on the interweb. The results indicated a single Fermi-based Geforce GTX 380 should beat ATI's dual-GPU HD 5970, however, the slides don't appear to be kosher.

Nordichardware got in touch with Nvidia and it turns out the slides were the result of some rather simple photoshopping. Someone basically inserted a bunch of new product names on an old Nvidia presentation template. We've witnessed plenty of these alleged performance charts laying around, but we just don't bother posting them as they are about as reliable as looking at a heap of fresh chicken entrails through a crystal ball whilst eating mushrooms.

Be as it may, we're still expecting Nvidia's Fermi-based cards to have an edge over ATI's Evergreen series. At this point, however, we just don't know how fast they will actually be and whether the performance margin will be worth the wait. Bear in mind Fermi probably won't ship until late Q1, but ATI's is also facing problems of its own, as it is still unable to meet demand for HD 5800/5900 cards.

Basically, both Nvidia and ATI played Grinch and stole Christmas 2009 from FPS hungry gamers. No wonder gamers are turning to consoles in droves.

More here.