The point is that it's not smart to think that high end is just for the image and it's not bringing any serious money to the IHV. NV had ~20% of revenue from workstation/server products last quarter which sells in far less quantities than any mainstream videocard -- even high end.
Yea, but did you look at the prices they charge?
A Quadro or Tesla card which is technically virtually the same hardware as a GTX260 or GTX285 goes for thousands of dollars. The cost of manufacturing is insignificant in the total sales price and as such the profit margin is huge.
Obviously those products generate a lot of revenue even at low sales volumes.
The same doesn't hold for the GeForce GTX series. The price is close to the manufacturing cost, and profit margin is small.
It's most likely the same for high end mainstream segment -- the sales are certainly less than in middle and low end sectors but the profits on each card sold are so much higher that even while selling susbtantially less they still bring an important amount of money to the company.
That wasn't the point though.
The point was a comparison with ATi.
Now ATi obviously has smaller GPUs, and slightly simpler PCBs. So ATi will have lower production cost.
Since they sell at about the same price, or nVidia even slightly more expensive, the conclusion has to be that nVidia isn't making as much profit as ATi is in that segment.
*But*, since the overall business results of nVidia compared to ATi don't seem to reflect that, apparently nVidia can 'afford' these small price margins. In fact, it seems that ATi is struggling more, on the whole. So apparently nVidia is doing well enough in the other segments, their bread-and-butter.