They are very expensive and no, they won't continue to increase in price because the low end is a dissappearing market.
Why, people buy new gpu's every year, or every two years because at some point the price vs performance increase makes you buy a card. That point is different for everyone, for some people, they'll get a £200 not quite top card every year to always have great performance, some people buy a £400 card every 3 years, and others by a £100 card every 2 years.
All that happens is, if the 6950 for instance was £300, they'd make more money on every 6950 sale, but they would sell hugely less cards and overall make less profit.
THe guys who only sell gpu's, are going to or are already diversifying. Sapphire have started selling more AMD mobo's and are selling Intel mobo's, so their plan is for every low end card sale they miss out on in the next few years, they'll sell a mobo to go with the IGP in the cpu instead.
A huge number of GPU makers have FAR wider ranging business to start with, MSI, Gigabyte, Asus.
You can't just increase the prices of products indefinately to make up for lost sales, because you simply end up with less sales and losing money. Can see a few more AIB's folding, and several more scaling back on staff and dropping the low end entirely.
Though low end is going to get very small, it won't dissappear, plenty of people, especially businesses need more outputs than IGP's will ever offer, or newer features, there seems set to be higher end cpu's for a while that won't have IGP's anyway because ultimately an IGP takes up die space that could otherwise go on extra cores and more power and loads of users want/need 2 more cores rather than saving £30 on a low end gpu.
THe current gen has been badly priced, partially I would guess to put people off buying them to a degree. I mean, 590gtx's do die WAY more often than any other card, they ARE power hungry and run hot as crap, so do 6990's(though they don't die because they didn't cheap out on the VRM's). But ultimately cards that run that hot with that much power on a small heatsink with no airflow, RMA rates will be high. AMD/Nvidia want a dual gpu card "out" to "win" the generation, but maybe don't want high volume sales and high return rates. So how do you deal with that, price it to the point where its just not good value, put people off buying it and then AMD/Nvidia don't have to waste a lot of money on replacement cards and bad PR.
The 4870x2 for instance ran great, was warm but not bad, and no where near the crazy power usage of a 590/6990, it ultimately gave a 280gtx a spanking, a royal spanking, and it was cheaper than 2 4870's separately.
5850/5870, 6970/6950, 570, 6870 are all well priced cards, we've always had some terrible value upper tier cards.
