Check out www.hexus.net the forums at www.beyond3d.com, www.guru3d.com and www.firingsquad.com to see ATIs new found prowess at devastating the Nvidias in Opengl performance. And I would say the drivers are only in alpha and the engineers are reporting significant room for even more performance improvements. So might want to reconsider the GPU choice.

it is said... a 35% of improvement on doom3 with the next 5.11 drivers (to be released on middle november) depending on the graphic card

Wow? I have a 9800 Pro, good news for me?? Not that I was ever complaining about the framerate. As long as it is greater than 29fps.

No the technology is based on the X1xxx series. It has a new technology that features a programmable memory controller. They are using algorithms on making sure that the memory and pipelines are optimized on the fly for max performance without sacrificing image quaility. Since the 9800 is not related in anyway to the new gpus which feature brand new architectures you will not be experiencing an increase in graphics performance. Maybe something will trickle down for older card users after the driversets are relased and ATI themselves learn more ways of optimizations but i am not keeping my hopes up for that. I read that there are new opitimizations coming out for future Directx games as well.

I'd like to see a 512MB GDDR3 GeForce 7800GTX benchmark with the X1800XT better, because all those benchmarks are putting quite a heavy hit on video memory, and many of the newer games such as Call of Duty 2 requires more than 256MB of video memory in high resolution modes.

A.T.I
Additional Trouble Integrated

while the mem controller is awesome, it is still app specfic. look up chronicles of riddick improvements vs DIII engined games/large ogl titles.

granted we are getting to a point, development-wise, where games on the pc are fubar'd because of development costs.

why program for 2million diff configs, when you can do 1 or 2 for consoles?...

well i'm proud to say that i've been running a 9600 pro for 2 years and never had any problems

something to think about.
maybe b/c the top graphic card is more expensive than the high-end console, or just maybe b/c Doom III is played better with a mouse

Console game quality is not as great as pc. The next gen consoles may be different but I doubt it. If the level at which ATI is releasing GPUs is of any indication, the R600 product is gonna rock the house. Rumor is they are actually using the Xenos gpu aka R580 in the Xbobx 360 to as a testbed to design the nextgen grphx card for PCs aka the R600...it will feature a unified architecture. These are great times for PC users.