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*ATI to Cease Selling Graphics Cards Totally*

AgaBoogaBoo

AgaBoogaBoo

Lifer
After two years of being ?a card company? and ?a chip company? at the same time, ATI Technologies reportedly decided to totally withdraw itself from graphics cards business and concentrate fully on selling its VPUs to Add-In-Board partners.

A web-site said today that an unidentified source from ATI Technologies told them that the company will change its strategy; as a consequence, the company will cease to market its graphics cards and will fully dedicate itself to VPU development and selling. It means that we will not see any ?Built by ATI? graphics cards on the market, but there will be more solutions by companies like Sapphire, TYAN, Gigabyte, Club3D, Power Color, Hercules and so on. In order to ensure the highest possible quality after the launch of higher-end products, ATI Technologies will outsource the manufacturing of such solutions to its current partner (PC Partner, the owner of Sapphire) and control the quality itself. Such products will still be marketed under different brand-names. The only consumer solutions to be sold under ATI?s own brand-name are ALL-IN-WONDER multimedia graphics cards.

As a result of yet another change in business model, ATI Technologies will shut down its free technical support services via phone and will deploy the same services charging the users additional money

AthlonXP.com thinks that the decision may affect RADEON 9800 PRO 256MB pricing. They suggest that ?Built by ATI? 9800 PRO with 256MB will become $10 more expensive, whereas the ?Powered by ATI? products will become $20 cheaper.

I now wonder what will happen to TV-tuner cards, FIRE GL professional graphics cards as well as other products ?Built by ATI?. Let us wait for ATI?s official statement to find this out.
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http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/display/20030604143044.html
 
I have FIC and Gigabyte 9800 Pro cards that are basically identical, made directly by Sapphire AFAIK. How does this change anything at all? I think "Built by ATI" still means what it meant before, which was "Built by Sapphire". Unless "Built by ATI" means there's an extra validation stage, I don't think this is big news.
 
i don't mind.. the only difference is the PCB.. third party companies can make great PCBs...

i guess we'll start seeing ati's image quality go down to nvidia's level... because many third party companies will cut corners on the filters..
 
No!!!!!!🙁

I have an Apollo Radeon 8500 and a true-blue ATI Radeon 8500 and the ATI version is more stable. The Apollo Radeon is unstable with Catalyst Drivers higher than v2.3 while the true blue ATI card can use Catalyst v3.4.
 
I agree with stormrider...I to had an apollo that was far from stable...it had cheaper cooling, lack of memory sinks and cheaper lower clocked (un-ocable) memory.....ATI brand was a signature of stability and the OEM's were a crapshoot....
 
Sapphire makes a lot of their stuff now, so I doubt it'll make little difference. But with 2D suffer like nVidia cards of lore?
 
The smartest thing for ATI to do. Since the vendors can handle the specifications quite well, ati doesnt have to monitor them either. If they dont - RMA time. So this will force the vendors to make better quality cards, reduce price, and allow ati to spend money n chip and DRIVER (hopefully!) development. nVidia did it almost right away - and its rather smart, to say the least: build a semi-working reference board with a good chip, give to vendors, and let them work the circuitry rather than waste its own man-hours on it. Go ATi, welcome to progress times!
 
Originally posted by: GTaudiophile
Sapphire makes a lot of their stuff now, so I doubt it'll make little difference. But with 2D suffer like nVidia cards of lore?
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as long as 400 mhz and above RAMDAC is employed, its not a problem 😉
 
I think this is a good move for them, doing GPU development and letting others worry about PCB and integration will probalby be good for them overall. Basic economics (and history for that matter) show us that if two group cooperate and focus on different aspects the result is usually a net gain for both. I'm reffering to the principle of comparative advantage and trading when two groups produce two different products, which results in a net gain for both. Of course this is a little different and it's not exactly trade, but the general concept remains sound, two specialists can work together to produce more cheaper for both.

Of course I'm not an economy major, just a Computer Science student who took some of the Business Minor option before getting bored with Business courses 😉 but it seems like a sound economic decision to me.

Now for some random speculation...
If they are going to keep AIW in-house (or at least as "in-house" as it is right now) then they will probably keep other stuff like TV-Wonder as well.

And my guess would be that they'll keep FireGL in-house as well, in that market profit margins are much wider than in the consumer PC video market and quality concerns are more important. I'd bet they can afford the lower quantity higher margin manfucaturing that will come from those cards.

Ed:
Hmm the 2D quality concerns could be valid though. I was very pleased with the 2D quality of the Radeons over the GeForces back in the day of the Radeon64Vivo and GF2-GTS, that was what started me down the Radeon path, it could be distressing if their 2D quality slags off because of this. Hopefully though RAMDACs are good enough that 2D quality will remain good.
 
*ATI to Cease Selling Graphics Cards Totally*
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WRONG!!😛

"The only consumer solutions to be sold under ATI?s own brand-name are ALL-IN-WONDER multimedia graphics cards"
 
This is so totally untrue as to be funny. Quoting from HardOCP who quotes a direct message from ATI.

Some folks that are not in the know are making statments about ATI pulling out of selling their own brand of video cards, this is of course simply not true. If you think that ATI is going to pull out of retailers such as Best Buy, Circuit City and Fry's, without anyone to really take their place, please think again. Here is the official word from ATI.

ATI has changed its distribution structure slightly to make selling through distributors more attractive to our board partners. Nothing else, including our support policy, has changed. ATI will continue selling its whole range of "Built by ATI" boards to major retailers in North America and directly from our web site. Europe and the Asia-Pacific region will continue to be served entirely by board partners. The change will make our products more widely available and get them into the hands of customers faster.
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Rest assured you will be able to go purchase ATI built video cards at local retailers.
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P-X
 
Its a smart move for ATI. Making graphics chips and video cards at the same time is what brought 3DFX to its knees. Its also a bad idea to compete against your own graphics chipsets in cards made by other companies.
 
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