NVIDIA is now the sole provider of independent graphics chips and motherboard chipsets in the market for all meaningful purposes. The combined market share of XGI, S3 and Matrox doesn't amount to much of anything. As you may know, ATI and AMD have announced a merger of the two companies to compete against Intel. AMD has announced that they will continue to make graphics chipsets but how the market will be down the line is anyone's guess. What is clear is that a company like NVIDIA won't go away.
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NVIDIA launched their 6xxx series in April of 2004. This was the first commercially available Shader Model 3.0 video card on the market, beating ATI's R5xx series by over a year and a half to the market. ATI felt, with some justification that the majority of games released in the timeframe of the 6xxx series would work just fine with their X8xx series of cards. Looking back over the last two years, they were mostly correct. NVIDIA launched their second SM 3.0 series, the 7xxx in 2005. This consisted of the 7800GTX, the 7800GT the 7800GS and related cards. Earlier this year NVIDIA released the 79xx series. Today I'm reviewing the newest card in their lineup the 7900GS from XFX, THE GF 7900GS 480M 256MB Dual DVI TV XT.
