Wow, Geforce FX 5700LE sucks!
Yeah. It's kinda painful. Really, the whole GeForce 5xxx series are rather disappointing underachievers.
The Geforce 6xxx series seem to have picked up the slack. I snuck to myself as a Christmas present -- A Geforce 6800GT. So, as you said, I basically spent about $350 on a card, knowing in a year it'd be worth less than $100... BUT... it's simply stunning! I upgraded to it from a couple-year old GF4Ti 4600. (Which I had chosen to keep over a GF 5500 that a friend offered to sell me, as my 4Ti benched and played better than his 5500!)
Anyhow, going from the 4Ti to the 6800GT meant games that barely ran in 800x600 medium detail no AA/no ASF now get great framerates in 1024x768 full detail 4xAA/8xASF.
I was really impressed by the performance boost. I hadn't seen a performance gain of that magnitude since I went from a Voodoo 3 to my old GeForce 2GTS. ;-)
I've also heard nothing but good things about the 6600, if you want to keep a little tighter budget, it should be a great choice.
