Not really, look at ati and Nvidia cards right, who gives a crap who is further technology-wise? Performance is what counts, Nvidia is wasting the benefits of the 0.13 process by pairing it with such a crappy architecture, one that can still be beaten by something made months before and on a...
Neither of the cards could be "optimized' more than the other for Hl2. But HL2 makes extensive use of pixel shaders which is much faster on the high-end and even middle Ati cards than on any Nvidia cards, especially DX9 shaders where the high-end ati is sometimes more than 3 times faster than...