ATI Technologies this week reached a remarkable milestone, shipping its one millionth DirectX 9.0 compliant cinematic visual processing unit (VPU). Beginning from late August 2002, when the first RADEON 9700 PRO graphics cards started to appear, ATI unveiled numerous VPUs, based on the R300 architecture: RADEON 9700, RADEON 9500 PRO and RADEON 9500. ATI and its AIB partners continue to be the only source for DirectX 9.0 graphics products.

According to ATI Technologies most, if not all, DirectX 9-class games currently on the market (I cannot remember any, maybe ATI can?) or in development have used ATI products as the development platform. ATI has seeded the game development community with thousands of RADEON 9700 and RADEON 9500 products. Game developers are also excited about the install-base this has provided, creating a strong market for DirectX 9.0 games.

It is a very remarkable event for ATI Technologies, especially considering that NVIDIA Corporation still cannot provide any significant amount of the GeForce FX powered products to the market [and even to the journalists…], if not take the Quadro FX professional graphics cards into the account. Frankly speaking, 1 million is not so much. According to Jon Peddie Research, in the third and the fourth quarters last year approximately 100 million of graphics devices were shipped (see this news-story for more details on the matter), therefore, 1 million of DirectX 9.0-class products represents only 1% of the whole market. As more than 40% of the market is occupied by integrated chipsets from Intel, VIA, SiS, NVIDIA and ATI, as well as by mobile graphics chips, while some cheap add-on graphics cards are usually bought not to play games, I believe that on the gamers market DirectX 9-class products occupy about 3.5% to 5% share, what is not bad at all!

Later this month ATI launches a number of new VPUs with DirectX 9.0 support what will only strengthen positions of Markham, Ontario-based company on this market. What about NVIDIA? No one knows, but, as we already told you last week, some clients are already tired of waiting for the DirectX 9.0-class graphics chips from this Santa Clara, California developer (see this news-story). In short, we may eventually find ATI being the most influential provider of 3D graphics processors despite of the fact that now NVIDIA has larger market share...