Conclusions
You've got to love that this $199 graphics card performs like it does, matching up well against a Radeon 9800 XT. The big question, of course, is how it measures up against the GeForce 6600 GT. As closely matched as these two cards are, that answer is surprisingly complicated.

The GeForce 6600 GT was faster in a majority of our benchmarks, if you want to go by sheer numbers. The 6600 GT waltzed through Doom 3 as expected, took two of the three Far Cry tests, and was easily faster in Need for Speed Underground. The Source engine video stress test was essentially a tie. However, the Radeon X700 XT shined in vertex shader-intensive scenarios, including the outdoor areas in Far Cry, the Rome: Total War demo, and 3DMark03's Nature test.

So the GeForce 6600 GT seems to have a slight advantage in terms of fill rate and pixel shader power, traditionally the most important measures of a graphics card. The Radeon X700 XT, on the other hand, seems to have a considerable advantage in terms of vertex shader power, and I have to wonder which type of performance will matter most in future games.

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.

At the end of the day, the battle over mid-range graphics is so close, it may boil down to which company executes better. The race to get these things to retail, and in AGP form, is on. If I were looking to buy a mid-range graphics card, I'd wait for whichever card gets there first, then pounce.