For the time being, the GeForce 6600 GT appears to be the card of choice by the slimmest of margins. NVIDIA's $199 card seems to have slightly higher performance generally than the Radeon X700 XT, and it offers the possibility of upgrading to a dual-card SLI config at some point down the road, when the right motherboards become available. The GeForce 6600 GT also offers Shader Model 3.0 support, packaging together a number of incremental feature enhancements, including a more natural programming model, higher-precision pixel shaders, and 16-bit floating-point frame buffer blends. More importantly, the 6600 GT seems to have very few weaknesses in terms of performance, image quality, and features.

The X700 XT also has few weaknesses, although its relative performance in Doom 3 could be a little better. Otherwise, it's all good, from best-in-class antialiasing (including funky temporal AA) to 3Dc normal map compression to the razor-sharp video signal output of a "built by ATI" graphics card. The Radeon X700 XT will recommend itself especially to those folks looking to play real-time strategy games and the like, where vertex shader power will be at a premium.