It seems like all the competing companies have "tiered" their product offerings to where there is no one right answer to your question. Each company seems to have several tiers of products that will be the "best card for the money" depending on (a) what you're trying to do with your video card, and (b) how much you are willing to spend.
For instance, right now I'm typing on my old AMD t-bird 900 system that I built two years ago. It has a GeForce 2 GTS 32mb card in it. I've played every FPS game on the market with this setup for the past two years. Right now, however, I am playing GTA3 and I'm noticing lots of video lag and poor response times. I don't want to spend the money to buy or build my ultimate new gaming system right now, but I need something better to tide me over until around summer. So my primary goal is merely to get something substantially better than what I have now for the lowest outlay. I don't care about being "bleeding edge" with this system, merely to make it work much better than my current one.
I'm building a cheap little Athlon XP 2000+ system with lots of RAM and I've been debating about the video card to put in it. I was stuck between the GeForce 4 Ti4200 128mb and the Radeon 9000 Pro 128mb. I've read most of the posts on here and I fully understand that the Ti4200 is a better card than the 9000 Pro. But since my situation calls for this card to be able to play all current games better than what I have and be cheap, I ordered the 9000 Pro today. I missed out on the BF sale at BB, so the 9000 Pro is quite a bit cheaper than the Ti4200.
So I say all that to say that, for *ME*, the best card for the money was the 9000 Pro. But that may not be the same answer for you. If you want to spend around $100, then the 9000 Pro seems to be a good choice. If you want to be around $140-160 then the Ti4200. If you want to stay under $200, then the GeForce 4 Ti4400 or the brand new Radeon 9500 Pro would be what you'd want to look at (the 9500 Pro looks like a killer card!). If you can get into the $300+ range then look at the GeForce 4 Ti4600 and the Radeon 9700.
The other guys on this forum can answer your technical questions better than I can, but you're asking a marketing question. And there's no right answer. You just have to know what are you wanting the card to do and how much do you want to spend.
Acme