Nvidia's the 'Value Leader'
Regardless of whether you're showing a 3-D model in SolidWorks, editing animation with Premiere or mapping out new terrain in ArcInfo, even the fastest workstation will be stuck in the slow lane without a top-notch graphics card. Large displays and HD video require an enormous amount of graphics bandwidth and graphics performance is more important than a speedy processor, ultra fast hard drive or a mountain of memory chips.
In the past this kind of high-performance rendering could only be done with a custom built graphics solution, but increasingly workstation manufacturers are turning to commodity vendors, like nVidia and ATI to 3D Labs. Barely a decade old, nVidia has recently taken the lead in on-screen technology and increasingly their cards are the choice of professionals.
"Professional graphics cards is a very competitive market these days," explains Lloyd Cohen, research director at IDC, "but nVidia is easily the leader because its technology is usually a half-step ahead of the competition." With more than a dozen cards on the market, "nVidia offers several choices in each area. There's something for everyone," adds Cohen. Because of this, nVidia has been able to rack up quarter after quarter of sales growth and has increased its market share to be the top seller of professional graphics cards.
nVidia is the top dog in workstation graphic cards with 55 percent market share of the professional video marketplace as of the second quarter of 2003, according to IDC's latest sales tally. ATI comes in second with 12 percent and 3D Labs lags the pack with 5 percent of the market. After that, the market is made up of a few smaller players including Elsa, Matrox and specialty makers like SGI whose cards only work in their own workstations. Current overall sales levels amount to about 500,000 units per quarter.
At a time when most info-tech vendors are struggling with flat or declining sales, the company's volume of cards has rose by an astounding 22 percent during the first half of 2003. According to Cohen, a big reason for nVidia's success is that their entry-level Quadro FX500 card, which sells for $340 and commands 71 percent of market. "It's the value leader right now."
The need for speed will always be paramount in workstation design, but "the real difference in graphics cards is the size of the data pipe," says Jerry Chen, nVidia's product manager for high-end workstation graphics. "Anyone can throw a lot of memory on a card. The trick is to be able to use it by matching speed with speed." In practical terms that means combining a lot of memory so that the card can create and hold complicated graphic elements with a fast and wide data path to and from the memory chips to get them out of the card and onto the screen.
For instance, the top of the line nVidia FX3000G utilizes an industry-leading 256-bit wide memory bus that runs at a phenomenal peak throughput of 27.2 GBps of data. Five- to eight-times the graphics speed of the typical PC, it's more than enough to show a rotating realistic 3-D model or an animation sequence frame by frame. "It is the key factor in performance," Chen sums up. "You can never have too much graphics bandwidth."
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