Yeah...I'm starting to think that's the best route...I don't really need DX10...

Plus this PC will have Vista...and now I can go back to XP if I want and still have full graphics capabilities...

Few things to note:

• DX10 is not the reason I advocate the 8800 GTS, although future proofing is nice
• There is a company putting together a DX10 stand-in library for XP, and it should be ready well before games start coming out in force with DX10.

Scores for the three cards from Tom's Hardware:

1280x1024x32, 4x AA, 8x AF

HDR/SM3.0:

• 8800 GTS 320MB = 2505
• X1950 Pro 256MB = 1349
• 8600 GTS 256MB = 1238

SM2.0:

• 8800 GTS 320MB = 2732
• 8600 GTS 256MB = 1632
• X1950 Pro 256MB = 1502

HDR/SM3.0:

• 8800 GTS 320MB = 1505
• X1950 Pro 256MB = 763
• 8600 GTS 256MB = 634

• 8800 GTS 320MB = 2062
• X1950 Pro 256MB = 974
• 8600 GTS 256MB = 650

In all but one scenario the 8800 GTS scores about as well as the other two cards combined.

Last benchmark I will show has to be explained a bit. In a lot of games they cap the FPS rate. So Composite FPS scores can be a bit missleading, better cards generally lose a lot of ground on the lower settings as they are throttled back to a point where they are identical to the other cards. Most people will be trying to play on the highest resolution their card can reliably handle so it can be a bit misleading imo.

In this case the FPS scores are from BattleField 2142, Dark Messiah, Doom 3, MS Flight Simulator X, Oblivion, Prey, and Warhammer: Mark of Chaos. They try the games at a wide variety of settings and add all of the scores together to get the following result....

Composite FPS:

• 8800 GTS 320MB = 1827.8
• X1950 Pro 256MB = 1243.8
• 8600 GTS 256MB = 1127.5