Well, it is really interesting to watch how the situation in the hardware market changes. Not so long ago NVIDIA’s positions in the desktop graphics chips market seemed absolutely unshakable and almost all the graphics cards makers handles NVIDIA very respectfully, and maybe even ingratiatingly. However, time passed and NVIDIA’s competitor, ATI began making more attractive offers to the card makers, so that now we are witnessing a nearly reverse situation. Of course, we wouldn’t call ATI’s success in this field a global one, but some pretty promising tendency is undeniable.
The best illustration of this trend is coming from PowerColor Company, which used to be one of the most loyal vassal of NVIDIA in summer. But about a month ago, this company turned to ATI (see this news story). We don’t know what is going on between this company, ATI and NBVIDIA at the moment, however, according to sources, the share of ATI based graphics cards in the overall PowerColor shipments made no less than 80%! The most profitable products appeared ATI RADEON 8500 based graphics cards, which brought PowerColor over 30% of the entire revenues, while their share made only 10% of the overall volume. Inspired by this success, PowerColor hopes to sell three times as many graphics cards of the kind in January 2002 than last month. This is what’s going one now...