If two things are clear about the standalone video card market it's that there's always something better coming and there is a duopoly of video chipset manufacturers between NVIDIA and ATI. It is hard to believe that it's been almost 5 months since NVIDIA launched their last video card chipset, the 7800GTX. Last month, after many extended delays, ATI announced and released their counter, the X1800XT series.
NVIDIA was started in 1993 by Jen-Hsun Huang Chris Malachkowky and others. From its humble beginnings, NVIDIA is now one of the most successful computer component designers in the world, being the third largest fabless semiconductor company, and having over $2 billion USD in revenue in the last 12 months. NVIDIA today has over 2000 employees and is in a lot of markets, including motherboard, video card, and console and handhelds.
The first NVIDIA card I ever had was an NVIDIA TNT back in 1999 from Diamond (Viper 550). Subsequent cards I've owned include a TNT2, a GEFORCE DDR and a GEFORCE2 GTS, a GeForce 3, a GeForce 3 Ti500, a GeForce4 Ti4400, a GeForce 5600 Ultra from BFG a GeForce 6800GT from eVGA and my current GeForce 7800GTX 256MB from XFX.
XFX is a division of Pine Technologies. Pine manufactures a wide variety of digital audio and video devices as well as computer peripherals. PINE was founded in 1989, with over 1000 employees today and over 500,000 computer components a month being manufactured. XFX has made a name for itself in the United States as a manufacturer of NVIDIA-based video cards.
