I'm looking to upgrade form an ATI Radeon 9600 pro and I'd rather not spend much more than $200 though my budget can go up to about $300. I was looking at the ATI Radeon 9800 pro as well as some of the nVIDIA GeForce FX5900 series. Is it worth the $200 to get the 8 pipeline 9800 over the 4 pipeline 9600? What about 256MB cards should I try and scrape up a little more cash and spring for one of those, or just hold off until the new ATI 16 pipeline cards like the X800 come down in price? I've had good experiences with both ATI and nVIDIA in the past so I'm considering both options, any suggestions?
If your budget is $300 maximum then you can get the very good nVidia Geforce 6600GT for AGP I assume you have. They're very good for the price and are around $230ish. Because they're meant to compete with ATi's X700pro and actually performs better. Here they are. I'd go for the XFX one since they have a good reputation.
If you look around you can probably get a GeForce 6800 or 6800GT for under $300, and that's what I'd recommend going for over the 9800Pro or GeForceFX 5900. The 9800Pro and 5900 aren't necessarily bad, but they're not the king of the hill anymore and are the last gen cards. You want something in the GeForce 6x00 (except for the 6200's) series or Radeon X800 range. I'd almost suggest the Radeon X700 series as well, but they're only available in PCIe format right now (AGP versions are supposed to come out at some point, but they're not currently available).
AGP versions of PCI-E native cards are mainly more expensive because of the extra HSI bridge that they must have for AGP mobos. Alhough they don't have to be redesigned for different ports.
I think I'm probably going to go for the XFX GeForce 6600 GT but I also found a XFX GeForce 6800 for about $60 more... Do you guys think it's worth it? Or is the performance going to be pretty similar?
Very similar performance, unless you start using Anti-Aliasing and AF. Which just smooth's everything out and barely anyone really uses.
The 6800s start to pull away when hi resolutions and AA+AF are enabled since on lower quality settings its mainly bottlenecks that cause the performance to be similar.
