I agree with CJJohnson. competition is good.
if there wasn't competition, the video cards and CPU's would develop about as fast as Creative's sound cards (which is not very)
in the last 5 years, hardware had started out to be competitive, then it started to really pick up especially in CPU's and video cards.
one of the first video cards to be considered a "high performance" 3D card was Nvidia's TNT/TNT2 (or TwiN Texturiser)
I think they were the first cards to have multi pipelines.
after Nvidia made their Geforce video cards, up to about the Geforce 2 series I think, there was a third video card company called 3DFX with their Voodoo cards. ATI was also in their early Radeon series cards. the Geforce 4 Ti cards really gave ATI and 3DFX a run for their money. 3DFX went out of the game, however ATI made their 9000 series cards. in that series, ATI was really shining. Nvidia had to rush out their Geforce FX cards (5000 series) and, ATI always had the lead in that series. now, Nvidia currently has the lead.
and when AMD made their Thunderbirds and Durons, the competition between AMD and Intel really started.
Intel at first were really outselling AMD, however that slowly changed after AMD released teir Athlon's (against later Pentium 3's), and especially Athlon XP's (against early to mid Pentium 4's, up to 3200+/3.2GHZ)
now, AMD has been really competitive with their Athlon 64's. a lot of people say that Intel is struggling against AMD.
*edit*
apparently there's also an X550 now. yet another card that will get low sales.