ATI today introduced a low-end Radeon X-class graphics card that utilises the company"s AGP-like HyperMemory technology to save money by limiting the on-board memory. The Radeon X300 SE is expected to ship in 128MB and 256MB versions, of which just 32MB and 128MB, respectively, consists of on-card video memory. The rest is taken from the host system"s main memory bank, accessed across the PCI Express bus.
Clearly anyone who"s chosen a PCI Express machine is likely to have a more powerful graphics card in any case, so ATI is pitching the part primarily against PCI-E machines built from integrated chipsets, in particular Intel"s. Integrated graphics core are not only offering ever-better performance, but crucially they"re grabbing a bigger and bigger share of the graphics chip market. That"s why Intel"s graphics market share dwarfs those of ATI and Nvidia even though it doesn"t make standalone desktop or notebook graphics cores.