[keithwalton]

i think this will be unanimous in favour of the 9800 (thats another vote in its direction btw), solidly fast cards, used to be a high end card with all the bells and whistles and has now slipped into mainstream level and is still kicking on strong due to native pci express cards taking over the mainstream sector they are actually not going to be replaced. Instead they're gonna keep on kicking them out for a while yet.

I would look out for a 256meg version pro (was allways quite rare may not exist anymore) of an xt which will be about to take another price tumble as the x700's and nv 6600's start to show up (slightly quicker than a 9800xt but pci-e only so far)

It allways used to be whatever had the most memory was inherently the faster in the days when amount of memory was really important (8meg vs 12meg voodoo for example). This ended in the era of the gefroce 4 ti when the 64meg version shipped with faster ram than its 128meg brother and in quite a few cases was faster in raw pace, but fell back when aa and af were involved. Suprisingly alot of people still base there card decision on amount of ram on it, mainly big manufacturers do it to claim they have an **mb video card in there system. The 256meg ati 9200 (i think) was born for this exact puprose

K

Edit - Just checked, the ati 9550 256meg is the current weapon of choice for high amounts of memory but lame performance. It has 256megs of 400mhz ddr memory on a 128bit bus, and a 4 pipeline gpu running at 250mhz.
This is geforce 3 ti 200 speed memory and ti 500 speed core, ooo it must be fast :-\