Nah, ATIs are all that bad. Guess it depends on how many polys youve got.

From my limited research, it is my belief that ATI supports a greater subset of OpenGL 2.0 than does the equiv nVidia card, for example. ATIs have had amongst other things, ansiotropic (sp?) filtering avail for quite a while. I've even got it on this card.

I've got a celeron 2.66 with 1GB ram and the _dirt-cheap_ ATI Radeon 9550 card, running two monitors. I've just tried a scene with 60 (identical) characters in it, for a grand total of 450,240 Tris. All of which are texture mapped with the same image.

In the viewport with both High Quality Rendering and Hardware texturing turned on, I'm getting 2.2 fps. When High Quality Rendering is turned off, I'm getting about 4.6 fps. I can get a 640x480 preview quality software render of the scene in 31 seconds.

The card i mention set me back the princely sum of $51!

Simon.