ATi is my drug of choice. They're Canadian and they don't resort to underhanded deals with software companies (I personally don't like booting up UT2K4 on my Radeon X800XT to see that nvidia is "the way it's meant to be played" every time). [Semi] Joking aside, it all depends. If you only want the absolute best of the last generation, the Radeon 9800pro or xt is the way to go, and now it's quite cheap. It's correct that nvidia's cards generally do openGL better while ati cards are best for DX, but I can tell you the Radeons are no slouch in openGL games like Doom3 (currently playing at 1280x1024 ULTRA quality getting average 55fps). Right now the top of the line NVIDIA's ARE fater and more feature packed. SLI, ps3.0, you name it. Current Ati cards only use ps2.0b, but the x800 and up introduces 3Dc, a cool normal map compression technology. It probably won't mean much to anyone right now, as Far Cry is really the only game that supports this stuff. However, you're interested in HL2 performance. Get a Radeon. End of line.