As you said something about playing recent games, an ATI card is going to be a bad choice if any of your games need (or would look better with) shader model 3.0 support. The x8xx series cards do not support SM 3.0. The x1xxx cards do support SM 3.0, but they have no drivers for Win9x/ME. I discovered this the hard way when I purchased BioShock three years ago :-(