Well, I've been pondering some of this I hate nvidia or i hate ATI BS. Note: BS stands for Bull Shark. I don't think that Nvidia is in quite as bad of shape as many people think, and ATI is not as superrior as many people think. I personally do not currently owne an ATI card, but i have in the past. They are both good companies, usually. Anyhow, look at it this way. In doom III the super slow and flawed fx beats the Radeon in pertty much every aspect. I know that D3 is not DX8, maybe half and half or full DX9. But it gets creamed in HL2 and has poor performance and many grafical anomalies in Aquanox 2. So if your with me on this one, i think that DX9 is simply very sensitive to the way the cards drivers are optamised for the game engins running on it. It's true that the 9700's and 9800's did perform perform well in D3, but they were not as fast as the fx. According to tom, there were no problems with either card as far as flaws or driver cheats or reduced quality goes. Only time will tell.