14 DAY TRIAL // Ever since NVIDIA first announced that some of its mobile GPUs were subject to possible failure under certain conditions, the series of bad news just kept coming for the Santa Clara, California-based chip maker. At some point it was rumored that some of its major partners, including EVGA, XFX, and BFG, were considering joining the AMD team and started selling Radeon graphics cards.
These rumors were also amplified by the fact that NVIDIA's latest products weren't doing as well as the partners had expected, when compared with the Radeon cards released by NVIDIA's competitor, AMD. It now appears that after Gainward, XFX is also considering the possibility of starting selling Radeon-based graphics cards.
According to a recent news article on fudzilla, the graphics card maker is expected to debut its first Radeon graphics card, sometime in Q1 2009. The company will continue to sell its GeForce-based products, but will also offer a range of these new offers. This is yet to be confirmed by the company, but the rumors are somewhat justified, given the low market performance of NVIDIA's graphics cards, and the fact that Radeon ones are continuing to gain more market share.
However, both chip makers are expected to unveil new products in early next year, which are to provide new levels of performance, thus possibly changing the market preferences a bit.
It will be interesting to see if XFX, up until now an NVIDIA exclusive board partner, will actually begin selling graphics cards that are equipped with a Radeon graphics processor. Moreover, following XFX, more NVIDIA partners could also begin making such products, which will ultimately benefit the Sunnyvale, California-based AMD. The company will, consequently, have a larger distribution channel. EVGA was one of the said partners that were expected to announce their shift to Radeon cards, but the card maker has denied any such attempts.