<< I guess the best general purpose cards at the moment are cards based on the GeForce3 Ti500 chipset (such as the 64Mb Asus V8200 GeForce 3 Ti500 Deluxe or the 64Mb Hercules GeForce 3 Ti500 with TV Out / DVI). >>
Correction:
The Ti500 is the best gaming card when it comes to sheer frames per second numbers. Period.
The best card if you are looking for features is the Radeon 8500, with (now) nice image quality, slower than the Ti500 but still fast, and dualhead capabilities.
If you have around $300, I'd battle it out between those two.