It's official: Hercules is now selling Ati based cards

[thornc]

<<
Hercules is delighted to announce today the release of 3D Prophet ALL-IN-WONDER® 7500. This powerful all-in-one graphics and multimedia board is based on ATI ALL-IN-WONDER® RADEON? 7500 technology, which Hercules will market in retail and distribution channels in Europe through an Exclusive Agreement with ATI.
>>



And this is only the beggining....

 

[Vegito]

Isn't that easier, selling chips and let someone else do the programming for drivers ? You can sell more chips right ?

BTW Do you think hercules is going to invest the money for programmers to write drivers ? also do u think they'll have better driver than ATI themselve ?

 

[zack86]

<< BTW Do you think hercules is going to invest the money for programmers to write drivers ? also do u think they'll have better driver than ATI themselve ? >>



hopefully, they will, as ATi is busy fighting the graphics war with Nvidia, it WILL take a load off their head if Hercules decide to programme their own drivers, possibly making them much better.

 

[PCHPlayer]

I highly doubt if nVidia does not write the drivers for their chips. Each manufacturer probably adds their own touch to the control panels, but the underlying Direct X and OpenGl is most certainly written by nVidia.

 

[Rand]

<<

Do you think hercules is going to invest the money for programmers to write drivers ? also do u think they'll have better driver than ATI themselve ? >>



Hercules is just using the ATi reference drivers, just as they always did with their nVidia boards.... though I imagine they will make slight changes to stick in the Hercules logo and other things like that.



<< I highly doubt if nVidia does not write the drivers for their chips. >>



They do indeed develop their own drivers in-house, with the exception of the Synergy/Quadro brand which is developed jointly by nVidia and Elsa.

 

[thornc]

But with Hercules handling the marking and selling, ATI can focus on the development...

I don't the full details yet, but this is only for the AllInWonder series, what I've been told is the that
Hercules will sell the whole range of products as well as built the card to be sold to oems...

 

[Rand]

<< But with Hercules handling the marking and selling, ATI can focus on the development...

>>



ATi will still be developing and reselling their own Radeon boards as well, so I don't see how it's changed their marketing/selling at all... it merely add's one more respected third party developer.



<<
I don't the full details yet, but this is only for the AllInWonder series, what I've been told is the that
Hercules will sell the whole range of products as well as built the card to be sold to oems...
>>




The ATi based Hercules boards that I know of thus far are....
An ATi Radeon 7000 based board, unknown core/mem clock.
An AIW Radeon 7500 model, albeit at a slightly lower core/memory clock then ATI's own Radeon 7500 in OEM or Retail.
And an AIW Radeon 8500 model, same core/slightly lower memory clock then ATi's own AIW model.
A 'regular' Radeon 8500 model, same core/mem clock as ATi's own OEM model which is of course slightly slower then that of ATi's retail model.

European distributed Hurcules models will be manufactured by Hercules themselves, under the parent company of Guillemot.
North American distributed Hercules models will initially be manufactured by ATi and re-sold to Hercules for packaging and labeling, as ATi is presently doing with their other third party developers.