POWER

As I've said for quite some time, its come time to upgrade the graphics department of my comp, as my poor 6200 flees in terror at the mention of Oblivion. My previous cards were a 9200, and a FX 5500, so I've gonna go with a high end model for once. I'll have 400 saved by the end of the month, and there a couple of choices.

The thing that sticks out though, is I'm seeing a lot of "reviews" floating around of the R600 becoming more competent with driver revisions, some people even listing it as good as the 8800 GTX in Vista. So, I'm in a dilemma.
I have three options, one is the 8800 GTS 320, its well in my budget and offers the best bang for the buck. Also, the monitor I'm getting is widescreen 19 incher, so it would be a beast at the resolution it'll be running in.

Then theres the step up, which is in the upper echelon of my budget. I've seen benches of the 640 mb walking all over the 320 with higher levels of AA and AF, and then some where their pretty much equal with the same AA and AF at the lower resolutions. Since I wanna see what this AA/AF rabble is all about, I want to pour on the most I can for the money.

Then, comes the meat of my question. If the 2900 is preforming on par with the GTX, it would the better buy out of both of them. Yet theres contradicting information, such as only the 1 GB GDDR4 model will be able to pass the GTX, or that the 2900 struggles to keep up with the GTS 320. The reviews are either using XP or Vista, neither comparing both at the same time, so perhaps AMD's drivers are for Vista are just better then Nvidias? Or is the R600 architecture just that inefficant and these "reviews" are talking hot air?

To sum it up, would I be better off with the 8800 GTS 320, its bigger brother the 640, or the 2900XT?

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