Okay, I've googled this to death and thought it's time to ask on here:

I work for a multi-media company that does primarily Flash stuff. I've pushed them to purchase Maya 8.5, which they did last summer, and we've been gaining momentum with 3D projects.

It's still not our primary focus, and they don't want to dump a ton on upgrading my hardware, so here's my question. I've been having some performance issues on texture-intensive projects, especially using paint effects for environmental stuff like grass, foliage, etc. My computer runs awesome but has a low-end video card, and we checked the performance and when Maya was running chunky, the performance with everything else was still pretty good. I've read that Maya relies heavily on the video card.

The boss is ready to spend some money on a better video card but not on the machine. Probably not more than $700-$800 to get me a good video card. After everything I've looked at and read about, it seems like in that price range the NVIDIA GEFORCE 8800 Ultra is the best balance of what we want for the price we want.

Any recommendations here? Feedback on this or other video cards that would fit what we're looking for? Is there another one I should consider? Basically he's letting me and our IT guy get whatever we want after we research it, as long as it's not more than like $700. What are your thoughts?