Even though ATI, graphics business unit of Advanced Micro Devices, was the first to market with DirectX 11-capable consumer and professional hardware, Nvidia Corp.'s Quadro solutions are still more popular among professionals. In Q2 2010, Nvidia managed to maintain dominant positions both on the desktop and portable professional graphics market, according to Jon Peddie Research.

The market tracking company said that in the second quarter of this year 87.5% of professional graphics adapters shipped were Nvidia Quadro (up 2.2%), whereas ATI commanded only 12.5% of professional graphics accelerators with the FirePro lineup. Nonetheless, desktop ATI FirePro graphics accelerators managed to capture 11.4% of professional add-in graphics cards (up 0.9%), but the lion's share of 88.6% still belonged to Nvidia. The latter also managed to gain some share on the market of professional graphics accelerators for mobile computers.

Nvidia's achievement for Q2 2010 is quite remarkable since most of the Quadro graphics cards Nvidia shipped were based on previous generation technology, according Alex Herrera, a senior analyst at Jon Peddie Research. In fact, ATI launched its FirePro V8800 and V7800 graphics accelerators based on Cypress chips in early April, hence, they have been shipping since Q1 2010, whereas Nvidia unveiled its Quado 4000 and Quadro 5000 products (powered by GF100 chip) in late July, which means that there were not a lot of such boards shipped in calendar 2010 to OEMs.

Nvidia has consistently invested significant amounts of money into development of additional tools for professional graphics applications so that to provide maximum advantage for the users of Quadro family of solutions. Even though AMD's graphics products group now can also boast with high performance and certifications of compliancy with a broad set of software, many professionals still prefer Quadro brand over ATI FirePro.

According to estimates of Jon Peddie Research, AMD and Nvidia shipped around 1.3 million of professional graphics accelerators in the second quarter of 2010. The technology and market research firm reports that the industry shipped 795 thousand of workstations worldwide in Q2, resulting in sequential growth of 9.6% and a year-over-year increase of 32%.

Tags: ATI, Nvidia, JPR, FirePro, Quadro, AMD, Evergreen, Fermi, Cypress, GF100