Given all the recent rumors of NVIDIA's major board partners leaving the Santa Clara-based chip maker, it looks like things aren't all that gloomy, at least as far as one partner is concerned. EVGA, which was reported to have pondered on manufacturing Radeon graphics cards, has infirmed the latest reports and has made it clear that it will remain NVIDIA's partner.

Bit-Tech was able to get a statement from EVGA's co-founder and Managing Director, Hans-Wolfram Tismer, regarding the company’s rumored intentions of selling ATI Radeon-based graphics cards. According to him, the company is still going with NVIDIA for its upcoming products. "We have absolutely no plans at this time to make ATI products," Mr. Tismer stated. "EVGA has a very strong link to Nvidia," he added.

As for AMD's statements of turning down the offer coming from EVGA, Mr. Tismer said that the Sunnyvale-based chip maker was not in a position to refuse EVGA, since it (allegedly) owns 60 percent of the US retail market. According to Tismer, Advanced Micro Devices was simply making a political statement prompted by its currently more competitive market position.

EVGA did confirm that, just like many of NVIDIA's partners, it also had to suffer the consequences of the latest developments on the market, but it also stressed that, even under the given conditions, it had no plans of diversifying its graphics card offer because of its current relationship with NVIDIA.

The news comes to cast a more favorable light on NVIDIA, especially in the aftermath of a period of very bad media. This could also put an end to rumors regarding XFX, the other major NVIDIA partner that was supposed to turn to manufacturing Radeon cards. However, this still remains to be confirmed.

In other related news, a new NVIDIA PhysX driver has surfaced online. The 8.07.18 version brings support for NVIDIA's GeForce 9800 GTX and GTX+, the GTX 260, GTX 280 and 9500 GT graphics cards. The driver has been sourced by Expreview, which also states that it brings support for G96 cards, which means that NVIDIA is preparing the release of the 9600GT.

You can find the new driver available for download right here on Softpedia.