you can buy a radeon 9700 right now... crucial sells one with a ramped up clock and its very own ddr memory.. you can wait till they release the ddr II version of the 9700... which btw it supports out of the box... or there is one version out there selling already with core clocks approaching 400...
the nv30 should be available either at the end of the year or early next year..
indications are that it might have a core clock of around 400mhz... it is either shipping with 128mb ram or 256... dunno yet... the radeon too is going to ship with 256mb ram... which it ALSO supports out of the box...
there is some confusion about the nv30 specs though... different websites list different specs... some going on to say that it will ship with a clock of 900mhz... ??????
there is agreement though that the memory access will be 128bit... which is half that of the r300 but apprantly there are processes devised by nvidia, or some other companies they bought, that allow them to still produce on par or better than the r300...
just for comparison's sake this is the white paper nv30 BEFORE the r300 was benched...
http://www.infosatellite.com/news/2002/05/a200502nv30.html
obviously that can't be the card coming out if nvidia wants to perform better than the r300...
not only that but other nextgen cards coming out from ati are the r350 and the r400 which have higher clocks, probably 256mb ram... probaby either ddrII or the ddr III thing that is being floated around... higher clock speeds and 0.13 micron process which the 9700pro will move to end of this year/early next year...
you can look on the main page where I have submitted a link with the latest possible specs for the nv30 as well as the specs and raw benches of the 9700 pro, 9700, 9500pro and 9500... and the featured/expected prices...
realise that the prices are around 50 dollars too much unless you buy direct from ATi or some other resellers like bestbuy or something...
but it should wipe the floor with ATI's driver barren cards!!
please emerge from your shell... industry analysts have been praising the catalyst suite of drivers since they came out.... ati's driver problems died a year and half ago... are they perfect? no... but name one piece of software that is...
ati drivers are fine... any minor glitches you have here and there can be rectified easily enough with patches or downloads of newer drivers...