MSI was better known as a tier one Nvidia partner that drives most of the graphics business, but since market significantly changed in last few months MSI just could not stick just with Nvidia.

With Gigabyte and Asus doing both Nvidia and ATI, MSI simply could not resist the temptation to join its big brothers. Even though it makes things harder for the big GPU guys, that's competition.

Read more: The Inquirer.

First ASUS nad now MSI. I trend seems to be catchin on and Nvidia is saying "Damn.... we are getting screwed" hehe

All these manufactors are going to ATi because of the sales

Once nVidia comes back I think you'll see a lot of switching and so fourth, because nVidia sales will go back up again

I heartily support this, as well as ATI. I used to be a bigtime 3DFX fan, however I'm more now into having more vendors in head-to-head competetion. As long as we have at least two companies there, we'll be getting at least partial deals.

That is too true Soul. At least with 2 different companies you can always count on the drive for the market share, which leads to lowering prices to gain more users.

Let's just hope it doesn't put pressure on companies such as ATI & nVidia, to the point where they'll keep thinking it's necessary to put "specific optimisations" for benchmarks such as 3Dmark to impress potential clients & such.

For example, it would seem the new Forceware drivers ( 53.03 ) reintroduce the optimisations Futuremark had disabled with the 340 patch.



Picture & info taken from Hardware.fr

Interesting about MSI...

If this is true, ATI might get a much bigger market share than they've had so far, since MSI is delivering parts to both Dell and HP who are the biggest player in pre-built computers...

Though it might also lead to a bit less sales for ATI's own cards, since Dell has been selling computers with ATI cards for a while now... But I think it'll end up a positive figure for ATI in the end...

As for the optimisations...
I doubt(/hope not) that we'll see too many optimisations with the nextgen cards if Nvidia manages to get their act together... But as long as Nvidia is the underdog, with hardware that lacks in the performance category, they'll do whatever that's in their power to make it look better (in speed not quality) to consumers... :/

I don't care much for nVidia but I do hope they get it together. The more competition the better; I wish PowerVR would hurry up and get back in the game as well, at least in the budget segment.

I always preferred stability over speed, and with ATi the cards I've had have always been rock solid. Now they are also the fastest as well. I've only had two nVidia cards, a TNT 2 Ultra and GeForce 2. Both of them were always locking up in games. Some told me I had bad hardware but I've always used the best ASUS motherboards out at the time and Intel chipsets. The same that I've used with the six ATi cards I've owned, which never gave me a single problem.

Isn't there a third company coming on the horizen ? seems to me i had read about a new GPU that had been developed that would shame ourr current lineup. was this for perfession CGers or am i out in left field entirely?

Anyway, as to why they switch, I would think it would have to do with PR. ATI is now considered the "top" card after Nvidias string of mishaps. Keeping in mind that business are usually slow to react, i would venture that this decision was developed around the time we saw the leaf blower card come out. Add that to the "padding " scandel on the benchmarks and you have a solid business case. I am sure if Nvidia gets back on top, everyone will swing that way.

Well, it looks as though nvidia managed to sweet talk MSI back into the fold...

The Inq reports that nvidia stopped MSI from becoming a "dual supplier", and only stick to nvidia...

I wonder how much of a discount MSI is getting pr chip for doing this...

How many companies are there that make both Ati and Nvidia cards? Or more, maybe even SiS (probably the company agrav8r meant) or PowerVR?

Well, Asus springs to mind right away..
Creative is to release ATI cards in Europe, but not in the US...

I'm sure there are more, but I can't remember them right off the bat....

ASUS & MSI had allready been producing ATI cards even before these announcements. The only difference is they were selling them to OEMs & not the retail market.

??? Where do you have that from ???

From what I know MSI has only produced Nvidia products, with the exception of Intel mobo's with ATI's new chipset...

It would be strange if they gave away good deals with NVidia for their chips just to create no-name boards with ATI chips... And Nvidia wouldn't exactly be thrilled and give good prices if MSI produced anything else than their cards...

MSI is known to produce cards for other brands. For example they produce nVidia cards for Creative & ATI cards for Medion ( News Link ).

Ah, thank you!

Too bad the link was in frech, a language I only know a couple of sentences, which the most useful is:
Je nes parles pas franchaise (not quite sure how to spell it though)