Teatime, it entirely depends. Hey, I did a
post on it! (more multi-monitor stuff but still in the realms of interesting).
The depends part just means "how much money do you have".
Toms Hardware does a variety of GPU rundowns based on price, and commonly some of the extremely expensive cards get
put down compared to crossfire or SLI. At the moment ATI has the fastest cards, although I still prefer nVidia's drivers.
I personally am veering towards getting a reasonably high end nVidia card so I can run 3 monitors with the addition of a second, cheaper one (once I can hack the damn fans so they're more quiet...will have to investigate that, since they don't do any real 3d processing themselves). I wish nVidia had some new stuff coming out, DirectX 11 might not be exactly necessary but it'd still be cool to play around with. I'll probably wait until it's closer to Christmas and I've sorted what other parts of my new PC I want to get first - the graphics card is by far the easiest thing to replace or choose, simply because most of the time you just go for the best bang for buck.
It probably is going the way of the dodo in the far future - they'll get more on-die multi-GPU things, but for now there are certain price points where it is good. If you run multiple displays though it's always dodgily supported (turning off second monitors, and limiting the amount of monitors you can connect - see my blog post), so be warned!
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