is video cards just a marketing strategy?
 
a ps3 can run games that look alot like dx10 or even dx11 perfectly  like DIRT 2 and BAD COMPANY 2.. and ps3 is like what... late 2006?   and 4870x2 is 2008 yet it dont have dx11 while ps3 got graphic of dx11. i got a 54" toshiba regza led on my main entertainment room playing BAD COMPANY 2 look damn amazing just like dx11. 
 
and crysis 2 graphic for ps3 look better than crysis 1's high setting
 
another thing my most powerfulest rig in the house is phenom ii 965 - 2gb ram - 3870 playing age of conan at maximum setting everything enable and 16aa/16 af and it run like shiet! stutter and constant hiccup. then i upgrade to 4850... still fucking same! constant hiccup then finally decide to install 4x 4gb (16gb) g.skill and its like wow! so damn smooth! i cannot believe my eyes! so whats the point of video card when i put more ram and its better than when i upgrade video card? even a crap ass mmo like lineage 2 has horrible stutter with phenom ii 965, 2gb ram, 3870... cant even set to max setting and 16aa 16af on catalyst... get stutter... then 16gb and no stutter. even a greater crap ass mmo like rappelz happend same.  so whats the point of video card? 
 
also i can play games on phenom ii 965, 16gb ram, 4850 alot more better performance than my friends i7, 3gb , 4890..... i even borrow his 4890 and stick it on mine and we both agree the performance is not noticible cause my previous setup is already high! so if i upgrade to 4890 it would be a waste of money.
 
and if you think about it.... 8800gtx to 9800gtx is no difference......  2900xt and 3870 is not a huge gap....  tiny gap that dont make differences....

some games are pure marketing for video card hardware. a lot of extra power really isnt needed but if a developer cuts corners and leaves out some optimizations.... they can market that you need new hardware instead of actually tuning and optimizing the game.
plus some devs cut lots of corners to stay on budget and on time

yeah your right. its tha man and the corps that r in control of the market... its a shit but thats how it works. pcs arent worth trouble, just play ps3
 
i have 5870s nd 4 gigs of ram nd pentium iv ocd to 4ghz but i still cant play starcraft ii without lag!! fuck the pcs

Yes and no.  Part of the reason why games don't look so much better on PC hardware is that they have to develop for what they determine to be the lowest common denominator.  I imagine if developers were only making games for DX11 cards, then the games would look better, but they won't do that because only a fraction of the fraction of PC gamers who actually buy their games would be able to play it.

Exactly.  If Crysis had sold 10 million copies on PC then we'd have had 2 - 3 extra years of graphical one-upmanship on top of that by now, and we'd be laughing about how 'good' the consoles looked (if they hadn't already been replaced).  But Crysis barely limped past 1 million sales and that pretty much ended the PCs role of pushing the industry forward, at least so far as graphics are concerned - which is why we've gone precisely nowhere since then.
 
PC gaming is still doing things that you can't do on a console, but the companies doing it usually have a fraction of the budget to do it with, so they tend to go for a wider scope, rather than an extremely high quality but narrow focus (think Arma 2 vs. Uncharted 2).  If a developer had the money and incentive to do it, I have no doubt they could make something significantly better looking than what can be achieved on a console - just as Crytek did with Crysis in 2007. 
 
Now, your problem you experienced with graphics card is just down to not understanding the basics of game performance on a PC.  If the game is being limited (or 'bottlenecked') by your RAM or your CPU, then throwing a better graphics card at it isn't going to solve the problem.  The game is gasping for air and you're giving it more fuel.
 
A 4890 is a bit better than a 4850, but not enough to warrant replacing the latter with the former.  It isn't really their intention that you upgrade like that with every revision - you upgrade to a new card when there is enough of a difference to justify the price.  For example, I went from an 8800GTS to an HD 4890 and saw a significant improvement, but upgrading to an 8800GT would have been pretty pointless for me.  The 8800GT was still a totally viable upgrade choice for plenty of other people, and offered them far better value than buying the GTS would have done.

Crysis sales have nothing do with graphical one upsmanship.  Crysis sold 1million copies at release because the majority of the PC retail market didn't have machines capable of running it properly in 2007.  I'm quire sure that its sales post 2008 have been more than decent and especially so for Warhead. Consoles cannot run the same level of detail at the same resolutions that PC can.  Even my dual 9600GT SLI setup gets over 100 frames / sec in Just Cause 2 at higher resolution and LoD than the console releases.
 
Nothing has ended the role of the PC pushing graphics standards forward.  Eyefinity, Triplehead2Go and 3D gaming are two such recent techniques which don't have focus on consoles, let alone more modern rendering technologies which only see the light of day on PC such as tessellation and HBAO.

I prefer my Mass Effect 2 at 1080p with a stack of AA and AF with huge textures and running at a constant 60 frame's per second, this is not something I can achieve on either console:D
 
Visually console's simply can't compete with a high end PC solution, or even a mid range one at that.  The tech in those boxes is getting pretty long in the tooth (The 360 will be 5 years old this year, hard to believe).
 
The problem with the PC is that it is not a fixed closed platform.  As a result tuning software is significantly harder to do effectively, a lot of horse power can go to waste just managing poorly executed code.   This will always be a key advantage of the console as a platform and it's why games keep running and looking progressively better through out the unit's life span.  As the years go on developers simply gain alot of insight into how to wring the most out of the ageing hardware.  But at the end of the day it only takes about 2 years to the PC to well and truely trump consoles when it comes to brute force horse power.
 
If they packaged the hardware driving my home PC tommorrow as a console, you would see some pretty amazing stuff.

Also I might just add that going from a 2900XT to a 3850 was more than worth it, the 2900XT was an absolute shit pile.
 
8800GTX to 9800GTX, yeah no gain there.  It's the same damn GPU just die shrunk and over clocked with a smaller memory pool and a reduced memory interface (384-bit to 256-bit).  
 
Infact... the 9800GTX was slower at higher resolutions due to the smaller memory pool.

 If anything, the current crop of console games shows us how badly optimized PC games are for the hardware they run on. That's not really a knock on PC gaming, as devs need to adjust their games to scale on a wide range of hardware. What scales well on the more predominant low- and mid-range systems is simply inefficient on high-end rigs. With games like Crysis, it's like they threw a whole bunch of visual extras in at the high end to make it look fantastic (and it does look fantastic) but didn't optimize for that since 1) so little hardware could support it, and 2) by the time that hardware arrived, gamers will have moved on.
 
It's not the video cards that are the problem. They're very powerful. But any new hardware platform needs time for development, and video gard generations have advanced far too quickly for that. It took three years for the PS3 and Xbox to really hit their stride. There are new graphics card generations every nine to twelve months. Game development cycles are longer as well, sometimes two to three years. As such, you're going to see more refined use of console hardware than PC hardware simply because the console hardware never changes.  
 
If you're a PC gamer, you're used to this reality. But it does intrigue me in that I'm eager to see what a next generation console could do with the  equivalent of a high-end video card today.