Hooray for tax season! I got a bigger refund than expected, so I'm putting $500-600 into upgrading my PC.

Current Build:

motherboard

processor

videocard

power supply

Right now i'm looking at getting This SSD and This chunk of ram to replace the 2 2gb sticks I've got in there., and putting the other $250-350 into a new GPU with hopefully enough leftover to replace some old and noisy fans in my system and maybe buy some beer to help with the teardown and re-assembly.

It looks like the major contenders in the $250-325 price range are the AMD 7870, AMD 7950, and the GTX 660 ti. I spent a lot of the past 2 years kicking myself for not getting a GTX 460 when I built the thing because everyone said it was an all around better card than the AMD 5850 I got. This time the major reviewers are saying the 7950 outperforms the 7870 and 660ti, but try as they might, neither AMD card offers physx.

So /r/hardware what would you do in my shoes? The vast majority of my gaming time is spent between TF2 and Skyrim where physx wouldn't be noticable, but occasionally I'll boot hawken or borderlands 2 and sigh at the particle effects knowing how much better they could be. Would the eye candy go that noticed? Is there a performance hit for turning it on? Are there any other worthwhile games that support that? Is the performance gap between the two cards in games like TF2 going to even be noticeable if i don't have a 120hz monitor?

I also render a lot of video via sony vegas and have heard both good and bad things about CUDA vs openCL rendering, which is another thing that the nvidia card would potentially offer over the AMD. I'm betting the SSD will have a much larger impact on rendering times than which rendering method, but I've heard stories of image quality (blur) with open CL and stability issues with vegas when using CUDA. If anyone's an expert there, I'd love your input.