Do you have ANY of the prettiness enabled in any of your games? What do you define as a "playable" frame rate? For some people, anything under 60 makes them think there's a problem with their computer.
While there is hype about new products of course, a lot of it isn't just hype. While your TNT2 Ultra can play current games at an "acceptable" quality and speed, it can't compete with say, a GF3, where one could turn on all the graphics features and still get far more than "playable" framerates. TNT2 Ultra actually does quite well in a lot of things still, but when you start going for the higher-end games it can't compete anymore.
It all depends on what you want out of games. It's up to YOU whether the higher quality graphics are worth your money. In order to keep the speed up and enable all those things, you have to upgrade to hardware that can handle it.
Suggestion: just say what speeds and relevant hardware you have, it's an annoyance having to click through to look at your AT rig.
If I had your stuff and wanted to start turning on features in games I'd get a new video card. The TNT2 just plain doesn't support some things, so you either can't use them or you have to make your CPU handle it. A new vid card would both allow you to use the features while keeping the framerate up, without taxing the CPU.
If you want to see an overall improvement in your system, not just in games, then the new processor would be the better bet.
Of course, you could get the best of both worlds. A Geforce2 Pro costs a bit less than a GF2 Titanium (Ti200 is only the GF3) but is essentially the same product, and you could also get say a 1.13 or 1GHz t-bird and overclock it. (Also VisionTek makes a GF2 GTS-V chipset video card, which is clocked slightly slower but costs nearly half as much as a GF2 Pro, and can probably be overclocked as well to at least full GTS speed if not higher.)
