That being said, are these cards terrible? No, and anyone who says they are is looking at them from a specific perspective. Are the HD 2400, 8500 and 8400 series cards good for gaming? No, but for an HTPC they would be good. Looking at the video playback CPU utilization as well as the fact they all have DX10 hardware means that they would be good for the home or office situation where an inexpensive dual monitor Vista experience is desired.
When looking at the gaming results and the video playback figures, the HD 2600 and 8600 series are indeed a value proposition. Both the ATI and Nvidia offerings deliver what they say, including H.264 hardware acceleration, and ATI offers additional VC-1 acceleration. They can play some existing games and will be able to play simple DX10 games in the future. We thought there would be more DX10 content available at this point of the year but this is not so. All games going forward next year will most likely be DX10, so these should be able to play games like the next The Sims or children's educational programs, but in no way will they be able to handle graphically intense titles.