With the tremendous early success of the new Radeon HD4850 and HD4870 graphics cards, AMD stands a good chance of increasing its market share in the discrete graphics segment to 40% by the end of Q3 2008, compared to the 30% share it held at the beginning of the year. This is simultaneously great news for AMD and terrible news for NVIDIA. With early benchmarks of the HD4850 showing the sub $200 card trouncing NVIDIA’s offerings at the same price point and even the more expensive GeForce 9800GTX, the company went on the offensive by dropping the price of the 9800GTX and introducing a new half-assed SKU called the 9800GTX+.

Again, benchmarks of the HD4850 including results from early samples of the 9800GTX+ show AMD’s card in a favorable light. At this point, NVIDIA is not really in trouble thanks to its incredibly strong brand image and impeccable reputation for producing quality video cards. The problem that the company is facing, however, is that they will now have to adapt to this aggressive new ATI marketing technique that actually has some very good products behind it. It is very hard for us as a media outlet to speculate about how this new GPU landscape will affect the profit margins of the two companies, but if rumors are to be believed, NVIDIA will remain in a comfortable spot financially even if AMD continues to gain momentum in the coming months.

We have been feverishly working on HD4850 numbers to throw in to a new kind of graphics card review. Since the long, detailed articles on video cards that you might be accustomed to on FPSLabs are not totally feasible with this new site design, we have had to temporarily rethink our strategy. In any case, stick around in the coming weeks as the whole NVIDIA/AMD GPU battle gets a lot more interesting.

Source: DigiTimes

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