Gigabyte has traditionally been a great manufacturer of ATI and NVIDIA cards. Before ATI sold cards to other AIB manufacturers, Gigabyte made solely NVIDIA cards. Once ATI sold chips to the AIB partners Gigabyte was one of the first companies to jump ship. For about a year Gigabyte sold only ATI cards. Late last year they started making NVIDIA cards again and now offer a full line of both ATI and NVIDIA cards, much like their motherboard business where they also make boards based upon many manufacturer’s chipsets.

ATI has really been a big success since they’ve started selling chips to Add In Board (AIB) manufacturers a couple of years ago. With sales to every major OEM including MSI, Gigabyte, Asus, and others, ATI has turned itself around from the time when it was a company that was on the technological and performance 2nd best (according to Beyond3d’s interview with the new CEO of ATI, Dave Orton). It’s interesting to see what brought them there. A lot of hard work has turned ATI from a company that was known for great cards with mediocre drivers into the number one choice for enthusiast gamers in the world. It basically started a couple of years back with ATI’s purchase of ArtX. ArtX was a small company that designed the graphics chip for the Nintendo Gamecube back in 2000. The addition of ArtX included several key personnel additions to ATI including Dave Orton, who I had the pleasure of meeting in 2002 at the ATI 9700 launch, Dave Ralston who I had the pleasure of meeting in June of 2000 at E3 along and others.

ATI really came into their own in 2001 with the release of the 8500, taking the technological and performance leadership which they hold to this day (One could argue that NVIDIA took the technological leadership with the 6800 Ultra but that card is still unavailable and doesn’t count in my book until it hits consumers hands.) The follow-up to the RADEON, the 8500 was an extremely fast chip but was beset by driver problems. Enter Terry Makedon AKA Catalyst Maker and a decision from the top of ATI to seriously improve their drivers. ATI really got into the enthusiast’s heart with the RADEON 9700 Pro. With the intended competition from NVIDIA delayed till February 2003, ATI basically had the enthusiast DirectX 9.0 market all to itself for 6 months. Whereas NVIDIA had the first DirectX 8.0 card, ATI had the first DirectX 9.0 card and improved upon the chip over the last year and a half.