by Anton Shilov
12/16/2002 | 06:49 PM
ATI RADEON 9500 PRO appeared to be a really perspective and powerful solution. Although there were very few reviews of the product so far and even less advertising, customers realised that for about $200 they get a true GeForce4 Ti4600 killer with DirectX 9.0 support. The demand by big personal computer vendors, including HP and Dell Computer, as well as retail clients and small system integrators has been so high that currently ATI cannot fulfil it.
In fact, there is no surprise that ATI cannot fulfil the orders now. The final design of the RADEON 9500 PRO was released only about a month or a bit more ago, as a result, the company simply was not able to produce enough graphics cards, furthermore, it seems that they had not ordered enough R300 VPUs that are utilised in all the RADEON 9500/9700 series of graphics cards. At the moment several partners indicated shortages of the R300 graphics chips.
Although there is a chance that ATI had made a strategic mistake and ordered less chips that the market demands, current R300 shortage also reflects the fact that there is some space for powerful and quality graphics cards on the market. Moreover, it means that ATI manages to successfully compete with NVIDIA, who is currently the leader of the graphics market in terms of share. ATI’s positions in the USA and Canada have always been strong and this year the company started loads of promotional campaigns for their European and Asian partners. All in all, it seems that finally ATI does not only defend its bases in the North America, but attacks.