3d video card suggestions

[DISH]

I'm looking for your experiences with video cards.
I had an NVIDIA GeForce3 on my system but it got traded in for an ATI Radeon 9700/9500 series video card.
The NVIDIA was slow and this card is better but still tediously slow when doing a photo real render or even a plot that involves hidden lines. (Is 45 min for a plot of a layout with 4 viewports common?)
So what types of cards have you hade good experience with and not...
I'm running a 2.0 ghz processor w/ 785mb ram and Acad 2000.

 

[borgunit]

Quadro4 XGL has been a very good card for us. We use Unigraphics and AutoCAD.

 

[smcadman]

Wow, 2.0 ghz processor w/ 785mb ram and it takes 45 minutes to plot a layout? How big of a file is this? I am working on an old PIII w/256mb. ram, and a geforce2 with 64mb. ram running detonator drivers. This thing is old and slow, but not even 25 meg drawings take that long to render using the photo raytrace option.
(This video card is an Elsa Gladiac 511)

Flores

 

[DISH]

The file that I am currently working on is about 37 mb (it has 70 xrefs) do you usually insert as a block or ???