7000 cards , pointless because there are no games ?

What do you mean by no games?

Depending on your resolution and the number of monitors you use, there are games right now that can't be maxed out with the current 6000 series.

Also, according to rumors the 7000 series will use the 22nm architecture that will lower wattage usage, and hopefully heat dissipation making it run cooler.

Not only that, the 7000 series will be the first ones to support PCI 3.0.

It has been 2 years since I had my 5850 and I will definitely upgrade to either the 7000series or the GTX 600 series after looking at benchmarks.

At the moment, these new cards likely won't see their full potential until the next console generation comes about. Still it is nice that we might see some cards that could max out Crysis 2 without either costing a small fortune or requiring you to buy two.

There is never too much CPU or GPU power. You can allways use higher resolution or more monitors (aka have higher resolution) But yeah, minespeeper should run fine even in 120000*6000 resolution or what ever...

If nothing else, the 7000 series allow good GPU power with even less money, compared to 6000 series... Good to customers.
But real upgrade in graphic quality is bound to next generation consoles (when we talk about those poor console ports), but there will allso be those tittles that moans every bit of computing power that you can just get. Not every game around there is "jus a poor console port". Some actually are made for highend PC in mind, or even middle range PC.

most PC games will always support the lowest common denominator (maybe consoles, or maybe Radeon 4xxx users, WoW for example doesn't care about console users), but a lot of them also push graphics to the limits. Some PC games don't care about the average consumer and only support the higher end graphics cards.

As long as hardware developers continue to improve the graphics cards, software producers will continue to produce software that uses 100% of the available power.

From the answers it's obvious that some people have more money and ego than they need. Personally, I have one box running a GTS 8800 with XP Pro and it runs most modern games at reasonable (for me) settings so why would I spend any money until that changes?

what? just because I love super powerful PCs means I have more money and ego than I need? I'm still running a 6800GT. I can't even play Civ 5.

Just because someone believes you can never have too much CPU/GPU power doesn't mean they actually buy new cards every year.

Well ram1009, you have better rig than I have. I have ATI radeon 1800 now... and still am guite happy with it, but I does not mean that these new 7000 series are pointless.
It all depends an what do you want to do with your computer.

There are a number of people who need two cards to get the settings they desire and have decent FPS. There are still a few games I can't max out with two 470's, quite a bit more when you count 3D vision. There are no single GPU's out there that can perform at power of 470's in SLI.

There are others who use 3 monitor setups, and still others with 2500x1600 resolutions.

Can you run games with low end hardware at low settings? Sure you can. Can you be happy about it? Sure you can, but that doesn't mean there isn't a wealth of higher end settings and games right now that could take the power of GPU's faster than what we currently have.

Also, even for those who don't care about good looking graphics, you might be happy to learn that with every new generation, the older generations are sold at very low prices allowing you to upgrade at a good price. Everyone wins.

One last thing, for those who believe FPS in the 20's or 30's is acceptable. This is not considered playable by many people. Some people even experience motion sickness, eye strain and headaches (I get motion sickness). You may also be surprised at how much smoother and reactive games are when FPS are over 40 (and over 60 FPS with a monitor that can handle it is smoother yet).