We've hardly gotten used to the new pecking order in the PC video market, with ATI's superpowered Radeon 9700 Pro enjoying resurgence atop the leaderboards while Nvidia Corp. offers a wide range of GeForce4 Ti cards at ever-lower prices. Now we've got to add the various GeForce4 MX cards and ATI Radeon 9000 and 8500 into the mix, along with older technologies like the GeForce3 and Radeon 7500. It's a tightly segmented market -- and as if it wasn't hard enough to peg each card's price/performance position, both ATI and Nvidia are racing to make the job even harder.

GeForce4 Moves to AGP 8X

This week, Nvidia formally introduced (to quote the press release) "the industry's first and only comprehensive family of AGP 8X-based products", which is obviously a jab at ATI for offering only its top-of-the-line Radeon 9700 Pro in an AGP 8X configuration. There were also thinly veiled pokes at the reports of the 9700 Pro's and/or some motherboards' AGP 8X stability and compatibility, as Nvidia noted that its products have been used as reference AGP 8X hardware.

The announcement covered AGP 8X versions of the GeForce4 Ti 4200 and GeForce4 MX 440, along with the imminent, AGP 8X-compliant nForce2 platform. Supporting AGP 8X on the nForce2 motherboard chipset is a no-brainer, and even the 128MB GeForce4 Ti 4200 could conceivably make use of the additional bandwidth, but the GeForce4 MX upgrade is a real head-scratcher. This move seems to be based on filling out the "comprehensive family" for PR purposes, since it's hard to imagine the GeForce4 MX starving on the bandwidth available from AGP 4X.

Still, it was all one big AGP 8X party, as Nvidia heralded the arrival of the 2.1GB/sec AGP 8X bus as a performance enhancement in and of itself -- although previous AGP 4X and 2X implementations haven't exactly set the world on fire. But as with other architectural enhancements, it's better to have them than not, and an incremental performance boost is better than nothing.

Nevertheless, if new AGP 8X versions of existing cards was the only point of Nvidia's announcement, it's tough to get excited. Granted that Nvidia's next-generation, all-out Radeon 9700 Pro rival is still at least a couple of months away, we've been hearing for some time now about newer GeForce4-based GPUs, sporting higher core and memory speeds and enhanced configurations.

For example, Nvidia and its vendors list specifications that suggest the core speed of the AGP 8X GeForce4 MX 440 will remain the same (270MHz), but the card's memory speed will increase from 400MHz to 500MHz. The GeForce4 Ti 4200 AGP 8X cards seem to have the exact same specifications as before, though that may only be the tip of the iceberg, as some vendors are rumored to have higher-speed products waiting in the wings.

Set the Vendors Loose

One strategy that's really worked for ATI is to actively promote the benefits of different configurations of the same basic video-card design. When the Radeon 8500 debuted, not only did ATI release a standard retail edition, but lower-cost OEM cards appeared with fewer features and lower clock speeds. At the other extreme, ATI offered certain manufacturers the option of producing higher-end Radeon 8500 products, even surpassing the speeds of the ATI retail cards.

This is in direct contrast to Nvidia's third-party partners, who basically get to provide the exact same card as one another and compete only on price. The ATI strategy allows many different vendors to coexist, while each finds its niche in the market -- whether it's lower-clocked, inexpensive cards like Jupiter's, or the higher-end, enthusiast products offered by Gigabyte or Hercules. If Nvidia wants to remain fully competitive, then its vendors must be given the same freedom to innovate and do what they do best: find and exploit open markets.

ATI also has an ace up its sleeve with the Radeon 9000 and 9000 Pro. These are basically the same design, itself a riff on last year's Radeon 8500, but at different clock speeds and configurations. The key to this product line is that the Radeon 9000 line offers full DirectX 8 compatibility in a card priced to compete with the DirectX 7-compliant GeForce4 MX. This is true in theory, but the actual price of the Radeon 9000 Pro gets uncomfortably close to Nvidia GeForce3 cards and even some OEM GeForce4 Ti 4200 products.

The real GeForce4 MX killer is the slightly slower Radeon 9000, which is available at a wide range of online outlets for between $65 and $70. This is a bargain that's proving extremely popular; full DirectX 8 compatibility in such a low-cost card is unheard-of, and the lower clock speed brings ancillary benefits such as a passive cooling system. Granted, a Radeon 9000 OEM card won't power through the benchmarks like a GeForce4 Ti 4600 or Radeon 9700 Pro, but it does provide a feature-rich baseline for the future.

Is It Crowded In Here?

Meanwhile, ATI isn't focused solely on the high and low ends of the PC video market -- its upcoming Radeon 9500 and 9500 Pro should do well with midrange buyers. These products use basically a scaled-down Radeon 9700 Pro core, with lower performance and specifications permitting more palatable price tags. The advantages include full DirectX 9 and Catalyst driver compatibility, the same hardware feature set, and potentially lower production costs for OEMs and R&D costs for ATI. Since Nvidia has not released its NV3x products yet, ATI is also free to position the Radeon 9500 and 9500 Pro as it sees fit, with much more freedom on configuration and price.

Indeed, there's one thing you can say about both Nvidia and ATI: Neither company seems the least bit hesitant when it comes to releasing new and improved products. This is great news for consumers, as we've never had the level of choice we do today -- and with both ATI and Nvidia ready to launch new waves of products, get ready for even more. This is competition at its finest. The only negative is keeping track of all the model numbers.