The current war between the graphics giants has taken a sad turn as it has started to resemble the script of a poor soap opera rather than an honest competition between two rivals.
The story so far: nVidia announces that its product range is the first to feature PCI-Express GPUs. Intel confirms that it has received 1,000 such boards. A few months later ATI announces that it is the first to ship a PCI-Express GPU, the Radeon X800XT (pictured to your right). It is revealed that nVidia's PCI-Express uses an AGP to PCI Express bridge chip, advertised by the company as HSI (High Speed Interconnect).
Just as Canada is about to break out the champagne for retaining the graphics crown, nVidia shouts that ATI is also using a bridge with its GPU. Confusion increases as ATI had claimed that its boards have a native PCI-Express GPU. The Canadians reply by accusing nVidia of using X-Rays to peek at their board and to add insult to injury suggest that nVidia engineers misinterpreted internal buffers as a bridge chip.
ATI shouts nVidia started it and goes on to reveal that Intel first contacted them for the 1,000 boards. Since ATI was unwilling to hand over so many, Intel had to turn to rivals nVidia.
While all this is going on both companies are faced with shortages and extremely annoyed customers, some who have already pre-ordered the boards of their choice. This lack of support for the customer can only be understood as arrogance since they are willing to spend so much time to comment on each other and seem to have neglected the people who put them at the top.
We are beginning to miss the old days when both companies enforced a policy of not commenting on each others products. Although very entertaining, these comments from both sides serve as a sign of how dodgy and cut-throat this market has become.