Who would have thought that ATI would make such a strong come back, after being almost doomed.

ATI was on the brink of extinction for more than a year, it had no competitive graphic cards so the only way to stay competitive with Nvidia was to keep reducing prices, which meant that they were loosing money, as well as market share.

And then the 4800 series happened. ATI had build the 4800 series on a small manufacturing process with performance audience ita target. This meant low manufacturing costs and more room for maneuvers, but what ATI didn't know is that their 4870 1GB GDDR5 card would come to be faster than Nvidia's GTX 260 card which was priced at $400 then as opposed to ATI's $300 card.

So not only did ATI make cheaper cards, but it had better performance than the GTX 260 and on top of that it sold for a whole $100 less.

Nvidia GTX 260 was build on a 65nm process and with bigger die, which meant it was more expensive to produce and somewhat harder, since its basically a GTX 280 with less processors.

So until Nvidia managed to respond with lowering the price, then releasing new drivers to improve performance, then introducing the 260 core 216, which is basically a GTX 260, just build on a 55nm process, so it meant more processors survived in the manufacturing and then reducing the price on it, as well as releasing new drivers, it all came too late.

ATI has sold more than 2 million 4800 series and introduced new cards like the 4830, 4670 and so on. As this year comes to an end its obvious that the main battle will once again be played with ATI's and Nvidia's new graphic cards, which should be introduced by march 2009.