Okay, so my buddy and I are NVIDIA fans, but I hear of the soft9700 hack for R9500 cards.
So he orders a Sapphire Radeon 9500 Pro OEM from PCCanada.com (plug).
He replaces his old GF3Ti 200 with it, installs the Catalyst 3.0 December drivers, installs Riva Tuner, performs the power user...