Lets not forget ATI's cheating on benchmarks - hijinks
was cheating its fixed now, and its not even really a cheat
the r 8500 has the hardware to out class even the ti 500, onces its drivers are better you will see it is alot more powerfull as of right now it is dead even with the ti 500 in benchmarks ... the 8500 has 1.4 Pixle/Vertex shaders why the ti 500 is on 1.3 (so in games like doom 3 the 8500 will most likely be even faster) also on top of that you get truform to make low poly models look somewhat higher poly ... add on top of that the 100 less the r8500 costs and its clear the radeon 8500 is the better card ... all tho it looks like the Nv25 (Geforce 4) may be out in stores sometime around Jan-March so you may want to hold out for it. I am not sure when the r300 core will be finished up so I am not sure when the next Radeon card will ship ....