Gainward, everybody wants a piece of ATI

WE HAD AN INTERESTING chat with a rep from Gainward today. Gainward was concentrating on showing intrepid journos its new line of multimedia and wi-fi products, apologising that there were no new VGA boards.

Our discussion of this topic led to something I was very interested in finding out about - did Gainward have plans to move to ATI?

Our official told us that it was under consideration, but since 'everybody else' was keen to start building ATI products, they were not sure how much market share they would be able to hold. At the moment, Sapphire, Connect3D and PowerColour own the vast majority of the ATI market.

Meanwhile, a representative from XGI, the eager startup, has been telling us that he believes that most Taiwanese vendors will start to offer two or more graphics products. Whilst he was doubtful that a vendor would be gutsy enough to offer both ATI and Nvidia, he thought that it would be possible to offer ATI or Nvidia plus XGI. He confirmed to us that they were in deep talks with Gainward about running a line of XGI products, whilst PowerColour and Gigabyte have already committed.

Nvidia is, understandably, perturbed, and has been working hard to try to stop this trend. µ