Digitimes
reported a few days ago that graphics cards shipments for the year have peaked in September, with shipments up more than 15% sequentially compared August. September's numbers also are a fair bit higher than last year's peak in October, but it seems that this isn't going to last, as the recent increase in memory prices is killing the demand for low-end graphics cards. It is however expected that Windows Vista, once launched, will counter this effect by increasing the market's overall demand.
It is difficult to analyze all this for further information on NVIDIA's and ATI's likely profitability in the next quarter, especially so considering these companies have different fiscal calendars, and that AIB shipments might have a slight delay compared to the revenue NVIDIA and ATI (or rather AMD, as there should be no more published results before the merger completes) might get out of it. However, as both companies have their Q3 quarter including September, it seems likely that this market trend will positively affect these results. In NVIDIA's case, it also depends on how fast it is slowing down in October however, and in either case, it makes Q4 even harder to speculate upon - it would seem unlikely that it is sequentially down, but it does seem obvious at this point that it's not going to be as sequentially up as it traditionally is!
