have a look for the PowerColour Radeon 9600 pro ''bravo edition''. It''s basically a 9600 pro clocked at the speed of the 9600XT. It''s a good card, the memory is high quality for the price.
I personally run a powercolour 9500 pro and I can say without a doubt it''s the best video card I''ve ever owned.

That said the 5700 may well give the 9600XT some close-ish competition, but I''m not happy with how much heat it''s likly going to put out... And it will likly be more expensive.

When I upgraded I was seriously wondering if I''d really end up using the extra features (I went from a geforce to a 9000 pro, finally to my 9500 pro) and yes, I now use pixel/vertex shaders (through Cg, ironically), and other features all over the place. It''s great.

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Some corrections...

quote:
What I like about nVidia is that they generally innovate alot more than ATI, with respect to API''s and extensions. They also generally go beyond specs that are required of them, for instance the 32 bit format they support ( slow as it is at this time ), and the fact that the NV35 has a much larger program size than the R3xx line of GPU''s ( it also adds another VP extension and I think another FP one ).

ATi followed the DX9 spec which says 24bit FP min, NVIDIA left the DX9 design since "their architecture wasn''t accepted" and went to do their own thing, which is what is killing them in performance now. They''re card is basically a DX8 card emulating DX9.

The program size on the R3xx has been addressed and has now moved up much higher with their introduction of the EBUFFER (might be some other letter, possibly ''P'').

quote:
Hopefully since nVidia can get themselves back on track now that they aren''t bothered by the XBox ( Apparently they had trouble with MS, because MS wanted to slash prices of the XBox, but they had a pre-agreed per-unit price with nvidia for their GPU''s, which they wanted to change. Hence they''re with ATI now. )

Their trouble was that NVIDIA thought that they could manipulate Microsoft with their XBOX deal and push their own architecture, this failed. This was one of the cause that NVIDIA left the DX9 development.

quote:
I''m not going to get into which is faster, because that generally isn''t the first thing I look for.

ATi is faster in DX9, no doubt about that. Development features are the same.

you are wrong what is killing nvidia performace wise is they moved away from the register combiner type of architecture, their design is more like a CPU(sorta VLIW and SIMD like),
their card supports 32bit per channel color which is beyond the DX9 spec(aka better), their card is so advanced that it can replace some renderman shaders, their shader program sizes are not restrictive, and they support conditional logic in the shaders(think of your quad of oct-tree being done completely in the shader hardware next year).
the only thing hurting nvidia is they are to advanced nvidia looked a little to far into the future , you will see the difference next year with the NV40 cards however. ATI is going to have to completely redesign their architecture(branching and conditional logic are not possiable with their current chip design) to fully support looping(branching) and conditional logic, while nvidia will already have their chips worked out and will have had the chance to have made their chips faster(rather then starting from scratch).

Ok, what good is the so advanced NVIDIA card if it runs slow. I mean it isn''t going to get any faster, why would I want to waste money on the super advanced product when it can''t keep up with the simple and elegant design of the Radeon.

btw, there already is a frogger game running in pixel and vertex shaders only.

I doubt that ATi would be in any sort of trouble for the next generation cards, their designs are good and map the functionality directly to hardware. NVIDIA on the other hand might be in some more heat due to their cheating/optimizing?