Well gmat it can actually be looked at a couple ways. The fx was really a good thing. Yes it means that the radeons will stay a little higher priced for a while maybe but really ati has a different plan than nvidia. Ati wants directx 9 compliant cards all the way down to the bottom card and the lowest price points. They really want to drive this home on nvida who has a habit of making thier low end cards really suck. Thier high end ones are good for what they are but the low end cards have problems.

The other thing is that nvidia was starting to take over the game makers. Really this is a bad thing. It was kind of like glide and 3dfx. It makes it so that games sometimes dont play properly on ati or any other card out there. It's not really ati's fault if things like that dont work right since it was programmed with custom extensions that only nvidia was using. From what I understand the fog in tribes was done this way.

When companies start doing this it is really a bad thing because it locks you into a product wheather the product is good or not. It is much better to program to the standard api's so the game is playable on everything out there.

Ok so it's most likely a good thing because now ati will be taken a little more seriously and the programmers who make the games will do a better job of supporting both video cards instead of just one or the other.

Besides ati will be comming out with the rv350 based cards that will target the low end market and when the r350 comes out the 9700's should still get cheaper. Things are only going to get better from here on out.