AMD DX10 still not spotted

The green team quietly rolled out the 8400 in the past two weeks, meaning that gamers can now get their hands on 84/85/86/88 and 88 Ultra cards, a range spanning from 30 quid to 500. But a couple of weeks after the red and green team announced that GPUs were shipping to partners - who we assume had the board designs done and just had to cart them out the door - we are still waiting to see availability on these cards.

Overclockers has nothing but the HD 2900 XT, and ditto Scan. There may be 1GB 2900 cards floating around in the US, but there is nothing over here as of yet. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the number of people buying these cards can be counted on the fingers of a very few hands, and the number of people using CrossFire with them even fewer.

Anyone who's worked in graphics knows that the big money is made in the mid-range products and that these are sold in no small part by the 'halo' effect of having a stonking-performance bleeding edge part. DAAMIT has neither mid-range nor bleeding edge at the moment, leaving it with a rather unprofitable situation.

Sources suggest to us that we are still a couple of weeks away from seeing availability on these cards at least. However, that time point puts them right in the middle of the holiday season, traditionally a quiet time. They might be out in time to slash prices for the back to school buyers, but that's hardly going to help with profitability. For now, Nvidia isn't just eating their lunch, it's stealing their hall pass for tomorrow, too. µ