It will come as no surprise to most hardware enthusiasts that the war between the main competitors is now moving to numbers. While this far the focus was performance and how it should be measured, now we are asked to consider the ultimate equalizer in any Western market, the sales figures.
ATI has just announced that it has shipped its one millionth native PCI Express visual processing unit. This figure may come as a surprise since you will, rightly, wonder if enough motherboards have been shipped to accomodate ATIs success story. The truth is that ATI has shipped a lot of its units, the Canadians still claim to be the only native PCI-E manufacturer, to partners and system builders so market availability is not guaranteed for the time being. While nVidia has been eager to show-off its Doom 3 success and the results of its Shader 3 support, ATI has been busy securing deals to distribute its PCI-E boards through major system builders, Intel being the most prominent example.
The battle for PCI-E supremacy is bound to become even more intense as both of the major competitors shift their product focus onto the economy segment of the market, offering boards for under USD 100. ATI is expected to offer its X600 and X300, now available, while nVidia is preparing its NV43 and NV44 for the same market segment. Prices are expected to range from USD 75 to just under 100.
At the same time ATI is working on the RV410, a modified X600 with eight pipelines and faster memory which should be available in Q4 2004.
ATI launched its full family of PCI Express graphics solutions on June 1 at COMPUTEX, including the RADEON X300, RADEON X600 and RADEON X800 for consumer and commercial customers and the FireGL V3100, FireGL V3200, FireGL V5100 and FireGL V7100 for professional customers. These graphics cards are currently shipping to OEM and system integrator customers worldwide.