Performance with the new Mac Pros?

I sold my old Mac Pro (first generation) a few months ago in anticipation of the new line-up. In the meantime, I purchased a i7 iMac and 12GB of RAM. This machine is faster than my old Mac for most Aperture operations (except disk-intensive stuff that I only do occasionally).
I am ready to purchase a "real" Mac, but I'm hesitating because the improvements just don't seem that great. I have two questions:
1. Has anyone evaluated qualitative performance with the new ATI 5870 or 5770? Long ago, Aperture seemed pretty much GPU-constrained. I'm confused about whether that's the case anymore.
2. Has anyone evaluated any of the new Mac Pro chips for general day-to-day use? I'm interested in processing through my images as quickly as possible, so the actual latency to demosaic and render from the raw originals (Canon 1-series) is the most important metric. The second thing is having reasonable performance for multiple brushed-in effect bricks.
I'm mostly curious if anyone has any experience to point to whether it's worth it -- disregarding the other advantages like expandability and nicer (matte) displays.
Thanks.
Ben

Thanks for writing. Please don't mind if I pick apart your statements.
"For an extra $200 the 5870 is a no brainer." I agree on a pure cost basis that it's not a hard decision. But I have a very quiet environment, and I understand this card can make a lot of noise. To pay money, end up with a louder machine, and on top of that realize no significant benefit would be a minor disaster.
So, the more interesting question is: has anyone actually used the 5870 and can compare it to previous cards? A 16-bit 60 megapixel image won't require even .5GB of VRAM if fully tiled into it, for example, so I have no ability, a priori, to prove to myself that it will matter. I guess I'm really hoping for real-world data. Perhaps you speak from this experience, Matthew? (I can't tell.)
Background work and exporting are helpful, but not as critical for my primary daily use. I know the CPU is also used for demosaicing or at least some subset of the render pipeline, because I have two computers that demonstrate vastly different render-from-raw response times with the same graphics card. Indeed, it is this lag that would be the most valuable of all for me to reduce. I want to be able to flip through a large shoot and see each image at 100% as instantaneously as possible. On my 2.8 i7 that process takes about 1 second on average (when Aperture doesn't get confused and mysteriously stop rendering 100% images).
Ben

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