The Changing Of The Guard

[Cowboy X]

Not so long ago the head of Nvidia was asked about ATI's growing marketshare and what that would mean for his buisness. He actually said that he was not all concerned about ATI but that his real competitor was Intel !

At the time I thought that this was a silly statement since Nvidia has never really had any integrated (built into motherboards) video cards except the Nforce1 and 2 , which are AMD soloutions . Therefore Intel hardly competes against Nvidia in that sense . It is not a market that Nvidia competes in and despite Intel's talk of extreme graphics , it is fairly obvious that Intel will not compete in Nvidia's turf ( performance graphics) anytime soon . All of this was with a backdrop of ATI absoloutely owing the DX9 market at the time and Nvidia not having any answer in what is by far their core buisness ................... performance 3d graphics .

Well here are the most recent figures :

http://www.tomshardware.com/hardnews/20041026_164352.html

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/display/20041026150740.html


The chickens have come home to roost and the erosion of Nvidia's marketshare hasn't stopped yet . Will the NV40 cards stem the tide ........... possibly they can slow it down but they will have to have a really good NV50 along with good NV40 refreshes in order to reverse the trend . But at the same time it will take several good product cycles before Nvidia starts to see improvements .

[speed bump]

Yeah I say this this morning. Rather interesting it really puts some pressure to make sure nothing else goes wrong with the NV40 cards. It also puts the pressure on ATI to make sure that the r500s are great cards so they don't lose that market share.