The year 2009 was really slow, unusually so when it comes to new product announcements and the better part of the second half of the year was spent waiting for new DirectX 11 parts.

In early 2009 Nvidia launched its Geforce GTX 295, something that has dominated the high end graphics market all the way until November 2009. Nvidia’s GTX 285 and GTX 260, both in 55nm were usually the best choice. In the mean time AMD had HD 4870 and HD 4850 cards and let’s not forget the dual-GPU HD 4870 X2, but all of them usually ended just slightly slower than Nvidia offering. The first part of year was clearly in Nvidia favour.

Then Nvidia started to mess things up. The rebranding scandal started when they decided to rebrand G92 based Geforce 9800 GTX+ to Geforce GTS 250. From the sales point of view this was a clear winner, but they were simply deceiving the market.

In the entry level neither ATI or Nvidia had great solutions to offer. The chips were ok but nothing more than that and most of them are not even worth mentioning. They were enough for some basic gaming and HD playback and that's about it.

Before summertime, ATI dared to be the first to launch its 40nm card. What will be known as one of its big failures ended up branded as Radeon HD 4770 and the world only saw a handful of them. This was an early sound that something is wrong with 40nm process and this issue really hasn’t been fixed to the present day. The end of the summer was all in ATI’s favour. At Computex AMD has demonstrated its first DirectX 11 hardware codenamed Evergreen. It worked and it could show some DirectX 11 demos. In August time, AMD was kind enough to show us personally the card running some test and in last week of September, the last days of Q3 2009 they have decided to release Radeon HD 5870, 5850 and 5770 cards.

AMD’s leaders have decided to drop the usual RV870 codenames and they’ve used Cypress codename for the top single card 5870 and 5850, Juniper was the codename for 57xx and Hemlock the 5970 the dual card came a bit later. AMD was the first with DirectX 11 and today, December 25th 2009, it is still the only company to have any DirectX 11 cards on market.

Nvidia reacted by announcing details about its upcoming technology packed Fermi architecture. Fermi was clearly the biggest disappointment of 2009. The architecture looks good on paper, its 512 shader chip looks promising and can potentially be faster than ATI’s solutions, but only if Nvidia could get its act together and introduce it.

Lets continue with Fermi. We were led to believe that it will come in November, then December and early Q1 time. Now its quite obvious that this card won't come before the end of Q1 2010. The way things looks from this perspective, we would be surprised to see serious volumes of Fermi on the market before Q2 2010. At that time ATI might have a counter card, a refreshed Evergreen series but we don’t think that this can beat Fermi, of course if we ever seen Fermi launch.

TSMC also didn't shine this time around. Even today they have some serious 40nm shortages and some of our sources have suggested that yields are at just 50 percent, which is definitely below any acceptable number, making the graphics shortage even more severe, We don't think this will get easily solved in 2010, at least we don't see any indications. Worst yet, both Nvidia and ATI high end chips are facing severe shortages worldwide, and getting any of them over the past several weeks has become a nightmare.

So today in last days of 2009, ATI is the clear graphics winner. It sold all of its 5x00 series, almost a million units since launch, as well as the remains of 4x00 series and ATI is clearly the dominant graphics player. It took ATI 6 years to get back to this position, as they were the better of two with R300 and now with RV870 – Cypress chip.

Nvidia has a lot of things to regret and we are sure that Jensen is not a happy man knowing that the competition is tearing them apart. The good thing for Nvidia is that ATI cannot ship enough DirectX 11 chips, but don’t be fooled, Nvidia is hurting big time for not having the right answer to ATI’s Evergreen.

We can definitely promise you an interesting year in graphics in 2010. As for 2009, we can just say we are happy it is almost over.