your going to find that everyone has different experiences with VGA's so.. I'll answer this, but others may have had other opinions.. First is your system an AGP or PCI system. And... you will want to know the rating of your power supply unit. ( PSU) you'll want to know the Watts,, ( 300W, 400W 500W.. or higher ) and the rating on the 12 V rails. ( they will look like this on your PSU.. +12V= 15A, or 20A, or hopefully higher ) you may have several 12V rails. This getting to be important because the high end cards these days are requiring alot more power than your 9600 did.
If your on an AGP system.. I think the best Nvidia has right now is the 7800 GS OC. ( OC standing for OverClocked) its a great card especially for an AGP system. If your a gamer, ATI also makes an AGP card now with alittle more memory (ATI 512 MB, Nvidia 256MB ) but both will work. If your on a PCI, the skies the limit. Actually the only limit will be your PSU. I currently have one machine running two 8800GTX cards from Nvidia and it runs Maya Fine. I also have an AGP machine running a Sapphire ATI X1950 card and its been running flawlessly. But, for the price.. any 7000 series Nvidia if thats what your looking for will do the trick fine. the 8000 series cards are pricey.
Hope I helped a bit....
There are also worstation cards that are really set up for work like this. Perhaps we can get a few workstation replies?? :bow: