Progress, Longhorn, and Market Share

FiringSquad: You’ve successfully leveraged the R300 architecture, which was announced more than one year ago, into three subsequent flagship products (RADEON 9700 PRO, 9800 PRO, and 9800 XT). At one point, it looked like the development of graphics architecture would continue accelerating. However, do you feel that the current trend of stretching a single architecture over a long useful life is the most economical approach?

Dave: There are, of course, many drivers for architectural innovation. One of the most important is the pace at which DirectX and other APIs are developed. The other main one is technology, by which I mean process and manufacturing. With R300, we created an architecture that serves DirectX 9 really well. DirectX 9 will be the predominant API until DirectX 10 emerges, and with R300, we created an architecture that serves the API really well. If you look at the step up from DirectX 8 to DirectX 9, that was a huge inflection point. As the industry evolves to DirectX 10, there will be more opportunities to optimize for whatever features accompany the API.

FiringSquad: What role is Longhorn’s feature set playing in the development of the hardware we’ll be seeing in 2005?

Dave: DirectX 10 and Longhorn look to be aligned fairly well with regard to timing. The most pressing issue we see is the operating system demands on our IGP parts, which will all need to comply with the updated platform expectations. Of course, when the operating system debuts, we’ll offer pervasive top to bottom support.

FiringSquad: What effect have you seen the lack of a low-end DirectX 9 board play upon sales? I realize that a mainstream card like the GeForce FX 5200 isn’t entirely capable of plowing through DirectX 9 games, but it does boast that one feature lacking from ATI’s competing part. How does the RADEON 9600 SE come into play?

Dave: Yes, DirectX 9 support has been a check-box feature at the low-end. We’re happy with the 9200’s performance, though, relative to NV34, and the fact that we can do more performance-wise. Our 9600 SE, with real DirectX 9 performance, is coming in at very competitive prices and it does a lot to compliment the 9200. Stay tuned for more in that particular market.

FiringSquad: According to a recent release by Mercury Research, ATI is picking up market share this quarter. From where do you see that market share coming from, and from which markets do you feel ATI still has significant room to grow?

Dave: Mercury is an “in retrospect” sort of thing, and now we’re in November. It is, however, a good representation of the past quarter or so. Those numbers reflect our gain in the desktop market. If you look at the discrete side of things, we gained additional ground while NVIDIA lost some.