It seems some firms just dont grasp whats at stake everytime.

S3 must have prduct development meetings whereby they assess what the competition is, what the current trends are. They then design a product but then at the last hurdle they just cripple it with some bizarre or just plain stupid design choice that you can tell straight away will relegate the product to landfill in just days.

Their last three or four efforts over the past 8 years or so have fallen into that catagory. Dont they ever learn?

Even budget GPUs have to have pretty good horsepower now. The bargain basement nvidia 9500GT will even beat the top of the range 7900GTX from two years ago in some cases.