14 DAY TRIAL // XFX was an NVIDIA exclusive Approved Partner until a little over a year ago, when the company began to also manufacture graphics cards based on technology from ATI, the business unit of Advanced Micro Devices. While there has been no indication of NVIDIA planning to drop the partnership with XFX, HardOCP founder Kyle Bennett reports that the rumor had definitely been circulating at CES.
XFX is considered on of the 'big three' along with the aforementioned BFG and EVGA. If NVIDIA is genuinely planning on terminating its relations with this manufacturer, the hardware maker may be significantly affected, especially if the upcoming Fermi graphics adapters prove, as NVIDIA claims, superior to AMD's products.
The GPU maker claims that internal tests have already proven Fermi's superiority and that the company is, currently, in the process of developing the drivers capable of fully utilizing, among other things, the technology's 12 stream processing engines, 384-bit GDDR5 memory controller with ECC and the 768KB unified level-two cache.
XFX, EVGA and BFG are the only partners of the GPU maker that offer a true, lifetime warranty on their graphics products. XFX, however, is unique among all of them through being the only one that allows consumers to transfer the warranty to a different owner. So far, the three-way relationship between NVIDIA, XFX and AMD is the only possible reason why NVIDIA would even be considering the termination of this partnership.
“The video card manufacturer landscape will be very different in the USA this year. Expect to see two or three major brands fall by the wayside when it comes to NVIDIA and AMD GPUs,” Bennett said.
While there has been no official word on the matter, the official announcement is supposedly going to be made soon.
In a similar rumored turn of events, Visiontek's products are also, supposedly, no longer going to be sold through what Kyle Bennett calls “a major USA e-tailer.” Of course, the validity of this rumor, like that of the one concerning XFX, remains to be established.