You all should keep a clear head when you try and figure out what video card to buy. It is complete ignorance to have company loyalty in the video card market. This is not as trivial as Pepsi vs. Coke because if you go one way you could really get burned. Didnt the Voodoo 3 is better than the TNT thing teach any of you anything. You cant think that way when it comes to video cards you need to keep a clear and level head. The Radeon 8500 at worst is equal to the Geforce 3 Ti 500, the cards are within 3-5% of each other in alot of benchmarks (www.anandtech.com, www.tomshardware.com, www.digit-life.com if you need proof). I see alot of people talking out of thier ass on this forum about how the Radeon 8500 does not work in SO many games, yet they do not own one ... hmm. Over at www.rage3d.com (who has a very active and level headed forum population) they say that the Radeon 8500 works well in many games and that they have found only a few bugs. You need to expect some bugs within a given amount of time, the Geforce3 had alot when it just came out (first few months) so expect some set backs. As for the Radeon 8500 hacks, please if its not in the current drivers its not an issue. We also need to remember that both Ati and Nvidias new cards have yet to really be shown at thier best. That is no games yet really use Pixel/Vertex shaders (yes Aquanox does but it was written for the Geforce 3, this is fact not speculation). The only real Pixel/Vertex shader game we have is in 3Dmark 2001 and the Radeon 8500 gives you the best score hands down (even Nvidia fan site www.nvnews.com reports this as true). Now the Radeon 8500 has some nice extras with it as well such as Tru-Form, Smoothvision, and 1.4 Pixel/Vertex shaders. Tru-Form is nice in older games like Half-Life as it smooths out low poly models so that heads, elbows, feet dont have points on them but a smooth curve. Tru-Form is about pointless in games like RtCW as the models are allready high poly (but its still thier thats nice). Smoothvision is not what it was cracked up to be, you dont see the extra preformance one would have hoped for, but it still is a good solution. As for the 1.4 shaders (Geforce 3 has 1.3) they are more powerfull and does make it possible to do some effects in as little as one pass. No proof has yet to be shown yet that you actually see a big gain in speed with them yet, we will need to wait and see. When you add the features of the Radeon 8500 on and remember its cheaper price, and put it next to a Geforce3 Ti 500 of equal speed you see it is the better choice. Just because Nvidia had the card to have in the past does not make it true for now or for the future. Remember how Voodoo was unbeatable ... Not to say that the Geforce 3 is a bad card, like I said it is basicly equal to the Radeon 8500. So remember keep a clear head when you shop for video cards and dont let this company loyalty get ya (how did this loyalty even start, you dont see it with motherboards, cpus, or ram?).