PCI Express Today: A VPU Mecca, or a False Step?

Although there are still not so many platforms with PCI Express bus, which definitely has significant influence over the retail availability of the PCI Express x16 graphics adapters, ATI pins a lot of hopes upon its PCI Express solutions. Why so? Well, they do have a lot of trust in the high sales volumes of their graphics cards used in ready computer systems.

ATI is shipping about 100% of their PCI Express x16 graphics cards to such companies as Dell, HP, etc. and according to their vision, the share of PCI Express graphics solutions has already got just a little below 50% of all ATI’s VPUs in the beginning of 2004. By the early Q1 2005 over 50% of ATI’s graphics chips will be designed for PCI Express computers.

All in all, the relatively fast distribution of the PCI Express technology among the system builders is quite understandable: all new and actively promoted platforms from Intel, the major CPU supplier in the today’s market, already use the new bus to connect the system components with one another. However, it is considered that only a relatively small number of ready PCs use high-end expensive graphics cards, that is why ATI’s idea about offering a range of 5-9 graphics accelerators priced from $249 to $549 can hardly be regarded as great. Nevertheless, the demand for gaming PEG x16 graphics solutions should inevitably grow up, especially, after more and more chipsets with PCI Express support for AMD64 processors have arrived into the gaming market. And it definitely means that ATI is going to look pretty competitive today.

However, many users out there still have their AGP systems and are planning to simply upgrade the graphics accelerator. Also, many system integrators are still shipping expensive high-end PCs with AGP interface to the market. Keeping in mind that ATI turned out less successful in the high-end AGP 8x graphics card market than NVIDIA this year, the new RADEON X850 and X800 are very unlikely to bring ATI that many laurels.

This way, we can draw the following conclusions:

• In case very few retailers and system integrators can actually get GeForce 6800 Ultra for PCI Express interface, ATI’s position with their new RADEON X850 gets much stronger.
• Since NVIDIA and its partners have hardly started mass shipments of GeForce 6800 and NV41 graphics cards priced around $300, ATI’s positions in this market segment also promise to be pretty positive.
• The launching of RADEON X850 and new RADEON X800 will not affect the ATI’s positioning in the expensive AGP 8x graphics cards market. Their major competitor, NVIDIA, doesn’t have anything faster than GeForce 6800 Ultra, which is very often slower than RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition, however, ATI hasn’t yet managed to overwhelm the market with their RADEON X800 XT solutions, which are the direct competitor to NVIDIA’s best selling expensive graphics solution today – GeForce 6800 GT.
• A great share of high-speed graphics cards available in retail today is designed to support AGP interface. However, this situation is very likely to change as PCI Express platforms will definitely be picking up in the future. We expect that the demand will move more towards expensive PCI Express graphics solutions when powerful PCI Express platforms become more widely spread, especially those designed for AMD64 processors. However, I wouldn’t try to set any specific dates for this to happen, as we expect it to take place within the period of time starting from mid January 2005 and going through mid February, maybe even into somewhat farther future.

Taking into account everything we have just said above, it is pretty easy to guess that ATI’s major goal this time will be to stimulate the demand for its PCI Express graphics solutions. Especially since NVIDIA cannot yet boast wide availability of ready products for this interface in its high-end product families, such as GeForce 6800 and faster, thus making ATI’s advantage in this market segment ever more evident.

Now that we have discussed the market prospective of the new RADEON X850 and X800 in such a great detail, it is high time we actually introduced our today’s main character: RADEON X850 XT Platinum Edition VPU.