This is all very disheartening. I can't believe anyone who bought an 8800 6 months ago is still not going to go through any buyers remorse anytime soon. I honestly didn't see this happening. The clarification that the 8800 performs MUCH better and has better IQ to boot is a hard thing to read as I have always been very pro ATI. I waited a long time for this day when both cards would compete head to head. All this talk about R600 having inherent hardware flaws such as lack of ROPS, a shoddy implementation of how AA is done etc is really making me feel quite disappointed in this card as a whole. I know it is my own fault but I wasted a ton of precious time in my life scouring all the message boards I could to gain every last bit of info on this card that I thought would be the end all, be all. I regret wasting all that time now. What makes it worse is the 8800GTX continually coming to my mind over this card is something I thought would never happen. Much better performance and technically better AF are winning me over, higher price or not. It seems people are just happy with the low(er) price of the 2900XT instead of what it can actually offer. The BFG 8800GTX OC2 is fairly cheap and less than a vanilla EVGA 8800GTX which sweetens the deal.

One other thing that is really bothering me that perhaps someone could answer. Why did ATI get rid of the 6xAA option? It has always looked VERY good on past cards however was kind of unusable due to the high performance hit. I was looking forward to using 6xAA on this card yet getting the same performance as 4xAA on my current X1900XTX essentially and technically bumping up IQ with no real loss in performance to what I am getting now with my current card. Getting rid of the 6xAA option and jumping straight from 4xAA to 8xAA means there is no longer a middle ground for IQ vs. performance. Jumping from 4xAA to 8xAA yields a high performance hit and is now going to be just like running 6xAA over 4xAA due to the drop the current cards having from doing this. Is there any technical reason they removed 6xAA being the only card to offer this or was just simply a choice they made that we have to live with?