I don’t know about you, but I’ve had enough with the games ATI and NVIDIA are playing with their customers these days. Yes, I am referring to the abundance of X800 series, X850 series and 6800 series products that are "flooding" the market. I am sure you got a whiff of what I am trying to imply by placing the word flooding in quotes. I have discussed the lack of availability issues in my graphics card evaluations before, so I don’t think I have to go through that again. We all know the poor state of product availability and while it is improving, it’s still far from perfect. The ironic thing is that both companies will bring in new products this year and with availability already scarce with current generation of graphics adapters, it’s needless to say that ATI and NVIDIA will have a lot of catching up to do. They had better be ready to support the market before they really lose the trust of everyone in the community (assuming they haven’t already). The point of this column is to talk about the confusion that ATI has generated by combining two products lines: X800 and X850 series. NVIDIA is more on the innocent side, but they have made their share of mistakes with their 6800 series. ATI is certainly guiltier as far as confusing its customers are concerned. This column isn’t just about ATI and NVIDIA, as I will also point out what their board partners are doing to add to the pandemonium.

Let’s start with NVIDIA first, shall we. Now, considering NVIDIA’s track record with its GeForce FX 5xxx series, the company has improved drastically. It’s previous line of graphics cards are as follows: FX5200, FX5200 Ultra, FX5300 (PCIe), FX5500, FX5700, FX5700 LE, FX5700 Ultra, FX5750 (PCIe), FX5900, FX5900 (PCIe), FX5900 XT and FX5900 Ultra. I think many of you will agree that this naming convention is fairly unintelligible. I can just begin to understand NVIDIA’s thoughts behind announcing so many different GPUs. After all, the company was suffering from stiff competition and ATI was wearing the performance crown for approximately one and a half years. Anything that was announced by NVIDIA was swiftly countered by ATI with products that were faster and in some cases ran cooler. The introduction of so many products was definitely a sign of desperation. This was desperation in terms of sales revenue, the need to stay solvent and the need to compete. I think somewhere along the way, even NVIDIA lost track of its so-called strategies and everything went out of control. Also during that time period, their customers were more confused than ever. From NVIDIA’s perspective, staying in business was probably more important than making sure that its customers comprehended their product marketing strategies. That being said, it still doesn’t excuse their disregard of the very community they were marketing their products to.

Thankfully, it looks as though NVIDIA has learned their lesson, as their current product line-up only contains the following: 6200, 6200 TC, 6600, 6600 GT, 6800 LE, 6800, 6800 GT and 6800 Ultra. The only concern I have right now with NVIDIA is their official reply on 6800 Ultra Extreme that was originally sent to numerous publications after the initial launch. We all know that the 6800 Ultra Extreme is just an overclocked counterpart of 6800 Ultra, but it does add to the overall confusion, nonetheless. NVIDIA did say that 6800 Ultra Extreme was something created by the media, but I would politely like to disagree with them. Companies usually have a tendency to jump right in when it comes to "incorrect" rumors. This means that if NVIDIA didn’t truly send the 6800 Ultra Extreme to the media, the company would’ve jumped on this issue to dispel the rumors right away. Since NVIDIA’s 6800 Ultra Extreme has been virtually unavailable, this "product launch" didn’t really hurt anyone, although I have one question. Why would NVIDIA create something that they never intend to ship? Was this just for the sake of competition? It sure did nothing for the community. For the most part, it seems NVIDIA is following the right path with their simple and coherent product line-up.

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