ATI finds some new friends

ATI, the world’s biggest underdog, has been making some huge gains of late. Earlier this week Gigabyte announced a shift towards ATI based graphics cards, ranging from the latest and greatest RADEON 8500 to the lowly stalwart RAGE 128 chipsets. This

ATI, the world's biggest underdog, has been making some huge gains of late. Earlier this week Gigabyte announced a shift towards ATI based graphics cards, ranging from the latest and greatest RADEON 8500 to the lowly stalwart RAGE 128 chipsets. This added to a growing list of manufacturers that are looking favourably towards the Canadian graphics giant, a list that includes FIC and Powercolor parent company CP technology (in fact ATI cards accounted for 80% of CP technology's December shipments).

The big news today is that Hercules has announced a strategic partnering with ATI to produce graphics cards. The main gist of the Hercules press release is that it has secured the exclusive European rights to the amazing ALL-IN-WONDER RADEON 8500 cards, which adds a swag of digital video functions to the RADEON 8500 GPU. However the press release also includes this gem.

“Hercules will also have worldwide access to the latest ATI 3D graphics technologies, including ATI's RADEON™ 8500 chip. ATI products have been designed to support the latest DirectX® 8.1 3D application-specific interface (API), resulting in support for more games and delivering the most realistic images possible on a PC screen. Hercules will take advantage of this technology to manufacture the most powerful high-end graphics cards in its 3D Prophet™ branded product offerings.”

There is no word on how this will impact upon the already strained relationships between NVIDIA and Hercules. After Hercules made a somewhat surprising shift away from the GeForce2 MX towards the little known KYRO II chipset last year it would be safe to assume that the relationship with NVIDIA was on the rocks, but by partnering up with NVIDIA's only major competitor in the current marketplace it could be safe to say that we won't see many more GeForce series cards coming out of Hercules.

In terms of the graphics chipset market as a whole these recent activities could be of major significance or merely a side effect of aggressive marketing and attractive pricing by ATI. If the move to ATI is based upon a technology standpoint, then one could assume that it directly reflects upon the next generation of video hardware. In the next months both NVIDIA and ATI are set to release new chipsets, and it would be reasonable to assume that manufacturers have already seen the cards running. The inference is then clear, that ATI have the superior product in the pipeline.

Of course, that is pure speculation, as the past years in the graphics industry have shown, you never really know just how good a chipset is until you see the physical hardware. But if ATI can keep on improving it's drivers, and with it's hardware already being used by Microsoft as the basis of DirectX 9.0, then these latest additions to the ATI card manufacturing family could well tip the industry balance back away from the dominance that NVIDIA has enjoyed over the past few years.

--John Gillooly