I bought an X1800XT and i thought it was great. It did everything i needed it too, maxed all settings and was smooth. The R580 only excelled at more extreme resolutions if i remember correctly, beyond 1600x1200, but below that they were quite close in benchmarks.
It wasnt bad either, it had the best imagequality to date by a HUGE margine, it did AA + HDR, it was the first widely available 512mb card and the new memory controller eventually allowed some nice benefits with AA in OpenGL games while making bandwidth hits in pretty much everything else minimal. It was only about 15-20% faster then a stock, i stress the word stock, 7800GTX if i remember right, however the lead become much more apparent with HQ IQ.
The only fiasco that launch had, like this one, is a large gap with no competition in place, and getting rid of a product alltogether simply isnt the answer. We dont even know what the refresh of the R600 will have in store for us, and its release is pushed further back, into late Fall even, if they attempt to go 65nm on it to maximize yields though that depends entirely on the launch schedule for the next product.
By the way R520 hard launched in the first week of November with the X1800XLs and the XTs following at the end of the month.
If you honestly believe they arent actually having a physical problem with the chips themselves then i can only say that is some really terrible marketing. Every week the 8800 series is left unchallenged the more people will give less of a damn when AMD launches. Alot of the sales of any series are from word of mouth, not based on what the latecomer does better and right now the 8800 has alot more street credit....actually all the street credit. Thats why the 7800 and 7900 cards were power sellers even after the X1800/X1900 came along and did things better. This was actually the good of paper launches because at least then people got an idea of what to expect. This though, would be a reverse paper launch, this would be the stay tight lipped until the last minute even though we're extremely late and losing prospective buyers all the time strategy.
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