High-End Comes in Many Flavors

To have a clear understanding of the numbers from Mercury Research, let’s listen to the principal analyst of this Cave Creek, Arizona-based company.

“Mercury’s current estimates on DX9 and DX9c accelerators differentiate value and performance by transistor count, with devices at and about 100 million transistors being considered high end. This is the methodology used in the most recent data that NVIDIA cited, and was developed for the original DX9 series of products from NVIDIA and ATI, such as the GeForce FX 5x series and the RADEON 9500/9700,” Mercury’s principal analyst Dean McCarron told X-bit labs.

Mercury Research’s definition of a high-end chip differs somewhat from the one commonly used among PC enthusiasts and in mass media who consider price and performance as the two main factors of a product’s market positioning. The $399 - $499 price range is currently occupied by NVIDIA’s GeForce 6800 GT/Ultra as well as ATI’s RADEON X800 PRO/XT products. Additionally, ATI and NVIDIA are shipping the RADEON X800 SE and the GeForce 6800, 6800 LE products, respectively, for $250 - $300. These products offer performance similar or higher than that of the RADEON 9800 XT, earlier the topmost offering from ATI.

NVIDIA’s products that incorporate more than 100 million transistors and that are likely to be shipped in mass quantities are GeForce FX 5900 XT,  GeForce PCX 5900, GeForce FX 5900, GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, GeForce 5950 Ultra, GeForce 6600, GeForce 6600 GT, GeForce 6800 LE, GeForce 6800, GeForce 6800 GT, and GeForce 6800 Ultra. NVIDIA’s GeForce 5900 and 5900 Ultra GPUs are unlikely to be officially supplied by NVIDIA anymore. Graphics processors like the GeForce 5900 XT and GeForce 6600 are usually considered as mainstream solutions because their speed is similar to ATI’s RADEON 9600 and X600 series that include GPUs made of about 75-80 millions of transistors.

ATI’s graphics processing units that contain more than 100 million transistors are RADEON 9800 SE, RADEON 9800, RADEON 9800 PRO, RADEON 9800 XT, RADEON X800 SE, RADEON X800 PRO, RADEON X800 XT, and RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition. The RADEON 9800 SE should also be considered mainstream since the speed it provides is close to the RADEON 9600 XT.

With such an abundance of graphics processors from ATI and NVIDIA that all claim to be called “high-end”, we think Mercury’s definition is rather loose and another factor – for example, the performance in some popular and widespread benchmark or the number of operations per second or price – would make a more reliable definition.

Anyway, even using that loose definition, we have reasons to think that NVIDIA with its GeForce 6800 chips owns a bigger share of the top-end graphics card market than ATI with its RADEON X800. This fact as well as the sudden growth of sales of high-end graphics cards in 2004 (for example, Tul Corp. reports a 100-percent growth of its sales, and ASUSTeK Computer talks about a 10-percent growth) has incited ATI Technologies to go for a considerable extension of its expensive RADEON X8xx series.