Pine Technologies, a well-known supplier of high-performance Nvidia GeForce graphics cards best known for its XFX brand-name, on Monday said that it would cease to exclusively sell Nvidia-based products and will start making and selling ATI Radeon graphics cards.

“We are delighted as this partnership allows us to incorporate the current and future AMD graphics technology into our future graphics card designs, and enables our R&D teams to develop an even wider range of graphics products for our worldwide customers,” said Michael Chiu, chairman and chief executive of Pine Technology Holdings.

XFX will debut its first ATI Radeon HD 4000 series-based cards in early 2009. ATI Radeon products from XFX will come with all of the popular features that XFX is known for, including factory overclocked XXX series, XFX’s support and access to customized drivers.

Even though the market share of XFX is hardly high, it is a rather popular brand name among enthusiasts that can further popularize ATI Radeon brand among gamers. Moreover, when XFX brings substantially faster ATI Radeon graphics cards to market, they will pressure a lot of pre-overclocked Nvidia GeForce adapters that are available widely.

Further popularization of ATI Radeon brand is just what the doctor ordered to AMD, who is working hard to get 50% of the desktop discrete graphics chips market share.

“In the world of PC gaming, XFX is synonymous with the extreme performance that enthusiast’s crave. Their decision to partner with AMD and launch AMD GPU-based XFX graphics cards speaks to the level of excellence achieved by the ATI Radeon™ HD 4000 series,” said Rick Bergman, senior vice president and general manager of ATI, graphics product group of Advanced Micro Devices.

Tags: ATI, AMD, Radeon, XFX