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I have an ATI Radeon 9800xt. What would roughly be its Nvidia equivalent?

I haven't been on the Nvidia bandwagon in years. But as I'm finding out now, ATI driver support for the Linux platform is inadequate. Nobody at ATI is working on the closed drivers, and ATI is being difficult about opensource drivers. This means I have the luxury of choosing between bad drivers and broken drivers.

I looked around and around on the internets until I got dizzy and threw up a little in my mouth. I noticed my generation Radeon goes for about 50-100 euros. Nvidia card won't leave that much more of a hole in my bank account. Problem is figuring out which Nvidia card performs more or less the same. Five years ago half of the reviewing sites were biased, which made little difference because both Nvidia and ATI tried to optimize performance on specific benchmarking tools, thus cleverly avoiding the whole point of benchmarking.

There has to be an easier way to figure out which cards are the same, but for the moment thought I'd ask here. We've all worn out our share of videocards, right?

I have an ATI Radeon 9800xt. What would roughly be its Nvidia equivalent?

Not entirely sure, but I would think maybe a GeForce 4...

Hmm. Maybe. Probably the expensive cards, because mine was pretty much top of the line back then. I'm not sure about the 4's. Maybe a mid-range 5 or low-range 6.

I found this thread: Graphics Card Ranking (3rd time's a charm...) - Overclock.net - Overclocking.net
Looks trustworthy? I remember there being other sites with large lists of benchmarked vga cards, with some really old pieces of hardware among them. That forum thread was the best I could find though, most of them seem gone or have weeded out their lists.

Anyway, according to that one source the closest Nvidia equivalent would be a 5950Ultra or a 6600GT. Does that sound plausible?

When I was doing some research on the parts for my new computer, I relied on Tom's Hardware's buyers guide, especially on choosing my new graphics card. I came across this [url="http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-cards,1805-6.html"]chart[/url] while browsing the guide.

Based on that chart, your 9800XT is equivalent to the Geforce 6600GT and 7300GT.

Aha, that's it exactly. I've already checked out some local vendors. The available card closest to those is an MSI Geforce 7600GT, coming in at around 84 euros (I'd write that down in USD but.. well, you know). I'm not sure if it will perform well on my computer, which is to say, if it will overperform due to an old processor or something else in my motherboard. That might be a little tricky to figure out.