The impressive performance gains offered by NVIDIA's platform optimizations don't significantly hinder the performance of ATI's Radeon 9800 XT. In our testing, the 9800 XT was often faster on the nForce3 250Gb than on the K8T800, and in the few cases where NVIDIA's optimizations appear to slow the 9800 XT, the performance difference is never greater than 2%. Not bad, all things considered.