According to the Taiwanese graphics card makers (as we read over at Digitimes), they managed to achieve much better results in July than in June. Nevertheless, the tendency towards the increase in the graphics cards sales volumes is first of all caused by the growing interest to solutions based on ATI chips. At the same time the interest to NVIDIA based solutions is not so vivid, sometimes resulting into reported decrease of the sales volumes even. We would also like to point out that the graphics card makers’ forecasts are not very optimistic, and they don’t expect any significant enthusiasm about the new graphics cards this autumn.

In particular, such ATI partners as Gigabyte Technology, Jetway Information or CP Technology are pretty happy with the sales increase. Sometimes this increase becomes really impressive. For instance in July Jetway shipped 60% more graphics cards than before.

As for NVIDIA’s partners, Asustek Computer, Micro-Star International (MSI) and Chaintech Computer noticed that their shipments grew up by around 20-30%, while some other companies noticed a slight reduction in the sales volumes last month. Leadtek Research managed to avoid slowing down the production of NVIDIA based graphics cards only due to the fact that there remained some unfulfilled orders left since June. Prolink shipped fewer graphics cards in July compared with the June results, because some European OEMs, such as Fujitsu-Siemens Computers, shifted eagerly to ATI based graphics solutions.

The growing interest to ATI based graphics solutions, which definitely tells on ATI’s “mood”, can be explained by several reasons. First, ATI started shipping its new RADEON 9000 and RADEON 9000 PRO in mid June. Of course, the new solutions couldn’t leave the public indifferent, which pushed the sales up. NVIDIA cannot please its fans with anything new yet and the expected “budget” GeForce4 MX family appeared far not so popular as it had been expected. Second, ATI is pursuing more flexible pricing policy lately, which also affects the graphics cards sales quite positively.

However, the graphics card makers are still very skeptical about the prospects even despite the tendency to sales increase. All of them are very much concerned about the mainboards on Intel’s integrated chipsets such as i845G, i845GL and i845GV getting more and more popular. These integrated solutions from the microprocessor giant are considered to be capable of ruining the sales of the low-cost graphics cards. On my part I would like to add that there is more potentially dangerous chipset coming out bin October: i845GE, with the graphics core performance improved by increasing the working frequency from 200MHz to 266MHz.