Although nVidia currently leads the technology and marketing race in the workstation graphics sector by a wide margin, it's a long contest and the finish line is a moving target. The company's Quadro FX3000 may be today's speed demon, but one wrong decision or false step and the company could find itself back in the pack, scrambling for market share.

"You're only as good as your last card in this business," explains Lloyd Cohen, research director at IDC. In other words, those that lagged could soon lead and vice versa. nVidia's commanding 55 percent market share may seem an insurmountable at first, but "the big can fall quickly. Look at what happened to IBM and how quickly they fell," adds Cohen.

With 12 percent of the professional graphics card market, ATI is a distant second and seems to have its work cut out for it. Or as IDC's Cohen points out, "there's a lot of catching up to do. It'll be a long crawl to the top." Others, including 3D Labs, which has about 5 percent of the market, are even further behind the eight ball. Then, there's SGI, which only makes cards for its own high-performance workstations, and some like Elsa and Matrox, which are trailing so far that they're off Cohen's radar screen.

Don't expect a revolution because nVidia controls so much of the professional graphics card market that it can devote more resources to researching, developing and producing the next generation of graphics technologies and get it to market more quickly. This should help it retain its lead, and maybe even pull farther ahead. Says IDC's Cohen, "It all feeds back: High sales mean more R&D money. More R&D means new products and growth. But don't count ATI and the rest out."

The beauty of this business is that one size truly fits all. Just about every advanced graphics port (AGP) card can work in any workstation equipped with an AGP interface. True, there are a few PCI cards still on the market, but high-end graphics is essentially an AGP game. Just as you pick a hard drive based on its disk speed and capacity, a graphics card is a matter of its imaging engine, memory and ability to put on screen what's in the designer's head.