AMD Brags About Their Prowless With Radeon HD 5000 Series, NVIDIA Still Not Shipping In Great Volumes

AMD loves to brag about how many DirectX 11 graphics cards they’ve shipped. I think it’s clear to everybody that when their executives casually mention the number on their earnings conference call, they’re really trying to ‘twist the knife’ on NVIDIA, who’s own Dx-11 cards were plagued with delays, shortages and reportedly yield issues.ATI Logon their Q4 2009 earnings call, AMD mentioned that they had shipped 3 million DirectX-11 GPUs, and now in Q1 2010, they had shipped a total of 6 million, so the sales of the chips seem to be pretty steady. The Radeon HD 5000 series of cards went on sale in October 2009, so they haven’t been out that long but are seeing awesome adaption.

NVIDIA’s DirectX-11 cards, the GeForce GTX 470 and 480 have just come out. We covered a story a few weeks ago saying that many ATI card manufacturers were going to cut the prices on their ATI Radeon HD 5000 cards to better compete with NVIDIA’s new selection.

In that article, ATI allegedly said to insiders that they weren’t sanctioning the price cut and they would make up a strategy for NVIDIA when they saw how the cards were received. With a six-month lead on NVIDIA, ATI definitely has some room for some price cuts.

Fudzilla reports that some of the higher-end Radeon HD 5000 cards actually have had their prices go up on the retail end because of high demand. Fudzilla speculates that ATI could actually afford a price cut on their end to better compete with the new cards. One thing is for sure, with this graphics card generation – ATI is in the driver’s seat and the market lead is theirs to lose.