I think Nvidia has caught up again. Last month's Maximum PC put ATI and Nvidia's latest budget (by their definition, US$200) video cards at pretty much a draw on performance (Radeon 9600 XT vs GeForce FX 5700). I started checking other reviews and support issues, but they both have good reviews as well as problems. In the end, my last video card was from Nvidia, so this time I got an ATI. My current system is going to have to last awhile, so I didn't bother looking at the price to performance ratio of cheaper budget cards.
My recently installed Radeon 9600 XT 256MB benchmarks nearly 20% below standard in 3DMark, due to my 'obsolete' 1.3GHz CPU. The benchmark uses DirectX features that most games currently do not, and I don't play FPS or flight simulators, so I don't expect the difference to be noticeable for some time. Divinity works fine. I checked out a couple demos I downloaded awhile ago, but don't really have anything to test the graphics. For comparison purposes, I should have ran the 3DMark benchmark on my GeForce 2 card before removing it, to see how it looked.
If you can wait a few months, ATI and Nvidia are bring out their next generation of cards. There may be new cards (or price cuts on current cards) around the time of Beyond Divinity's release, but I didn't check that before ordering. Oh well.
Endian.net Roadmap has expected release dates of various stuff (March 18 for ATI R420, Q2 Nvidia NV40).
