‘Nvidia only’ strategy pays off for XFX
When Nvidia launched its GeForce 8800, the whole camp of Nvidia camp graphics card makers was elated, and among them was Pine Technology, which markets graphics cards under the XFX brand name. Based in Hong Kong, Pine has been a loyal Nvidia supporter ever since the company decided to concentrate on the graphics card market. Now, one of Nvidia’s key AIC (add-in-cards) partners, Pine is a strong player in a market dominated by competitors from Taiwan.
The graphics card market has been seeing big changes since AMD acquired ATI. The future status of ATI products and Intel’s integrated graphics processor (IGP) chipsets will have a crucial impact on the market. ATI dominated the market before 2000. After that, ATIs R&D, card performances and marketing were in general rather inefficient in terms of “time to market.” That gave Nvidia the opportunity. Nvidia started to flex its muscles with the launch of the GeForce FX series. Then, the 6 and 7 series took the market by storm. The 8800GTX/GTS launched in November 2006 are killer products. In contrast, among ATI’s last series, only the X1950PRO can effectively compete with Nvidia’s GeForce 7900GS in the cost-performance ratio, while the Radeon X1950XTX (codenamed R580+), which only supports DirectX 9.0, is unable to compete with the G80…
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