Well, right now ATI has shown off Half Life 2 on the 9800 Pro, and Doom 3 has mostly been shown publicially on the 9700 Pro. While numbers are still up in the air about Doom 3 peformance, either of these two cards would definitly be fine. Of course, the 9700 Pro still sits about $300 US if you can find it.

I also won't trust Doom 3 benchmark numbers when done on an NVidia card due to who knows what cheats they might be trying to pass off in their drivers. While ATI got caught once with the Quack 3 issue, they at least learned their lesson. For NVidia to put 12 seperate cheats into their drivers to improve 3DMark scores is just not something I can easially forget.