ATI/Nvidia Releases New Roadmap

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Whenever someone asks us who the larger graphics designer is, they are always shocked when we reply with the truth: Intel. As much as ATI or NVIDIA would like you to believe, discrete graphics make up the minority of the desktop graphics market. Integrated graphics account for the majority of the graphics market and neither VIA, S3, XGI, NVIDIA nor ATI ever held enough pull to really put a dent into Intel's sales. nForce2 IGP may have been the only exception to this, but at the time Athlon was still new and didn't hold a lot of market share either. Of course, the profit margins and performance of integrated graphics pales in comparison to discrete graphics, but the majority of people are not gamers so expensive graphics solutions are overkill.

NVIDIA decided to stop their IGP initiatives for a couple years; nForce3 and the original nForce4 boards do not have any integrated graphics at all. Some nForce4 OEM partners have opted to bundle low cost GeForce 6200TC video cards with nForce4 motherboards, although the cost of these bundles usually exceed the magic $100 price point. ATI has been mildly successful with the Xpress 200 (RS480, RS400) chipset since picking up Fujitsu and Gateway, although RS350 and RS300 were not very successful at all.