The PC industry is pretty crooked, and I speak from experience, both in retail and distribution.
This whole Graphics card thing has really turned me off the latest and greatest. the bottom line for me is that I'm not willing to spend more than $200 for a VC.
I can see clearly now that we're passed the performance point where the VC used to hold us back: we're in a phase where the VC can enhance a few of our gaming experiences, and that's just outside of what I do on a PC.
Just like the hard drive warranty fiasco, where the mainstream HDD's warranties fell to one year, we may very well be going through a market segmentation. Sure, we've always had the basic SiS or Trident cards, but now we're looking at three levels:
-the basic "it works" card
-the mid-level user (me)
-the gamer
Now we ought to get review sites to acknowledge this segmentation, so that the manufacturers can acknowledge it. Then again, we could always go on and pick up the crumbs they leave, such as me picking up an ATI Radeon 9700 pro.
I have no problem buying a mature product, where all the drivers are tweaked out, and bugs/kinks worked out, since it's obvious that the manufacturers are only putting the gamers on the bleeding technological edge.