In a normal class certification hearing, the plaintiffs revealed an email between Nvidia senior VP of marketing, Dan Vivoli, and ATI’s president and COO, Dave Orton, which points to inflated prices and collusion. It reads: “I really think we should work harder together on the marketing front. As you and I have talked about, even though we are competitors, we have the common goal of making our category a well positioned, respected playing field. $5 and $8 stocks are a result of no respect.”
While Nvidia’s supremacy has been clear over the last year, this email-gone-public is a huge blow to both videocard companies. Presiding judge Aslup stated the class certification will be further investigated.
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NVIDIA’s new video cards are set to receive a much-needed price drop in order to compete more effectively with AMD’s 4800 series. As we reported last week, the G200 cards were not selling as quickly as anticipated for a new GeForce release. Whilst this might attract new buyers, we can’t help but feel sorry for those who just shelled out up to £400 for their 280 only to see its price plummet by as much as £100!

A source from www.overclockers.co.uk – one of the UK’s largest hardware resellers - has revealed to Total PC Gaming that sales of nVIDIA’s new 280 and 260 GTX cards are much slower than normally expected for a new GeForce release. The Radeon 4800 series is being cited as the cause for this, as ATi’s latest cards perform similarly but are significantly cheaper. We will be looking at both of manufacturer’s latest and greatest offerings in our supertest the next issue which will be on sale 7th August.

NVIDIA’s latest graphics card, the GTX 280, goes on sale today. The GTX 280 is, to date, the fastest consumer card from NVIDIA, outperforming its current top-end model the 9800 GX2. Its got a 602MHz core clock, 1GB of GDDR3 memory at 2.2GHz and 1296MHz shader clock. A quick search of various online stores shows prices starting at £429 and going up to over £500 for factory-overclocked models. If that’s a little too rich for you, the GTX 260 will be available from 26th June. It has a slower core, memory and shader clock speeds and 896MB RAM instead of 1GB, but can be found for around £300. There are reviews at AnandTech, Tom’s Hardware, Ubergizmo and many other sites, and we’ll be taking a close look at the card in issue 9, on sale 10th July.

NVIDIA’s almost total dominance of the graphics card market continues with the release of the new 9600 GT. The folk at Expreview.com found that two 9600’s in SLI beat AMD’s flagship 3870X2 in almost all benchmarks, a surprising result considering that the X2 costs around £280-300 and the 9600 GT can be found for as little as £112.