It would no longer take Nvidia head on in an increasingly futile contest to produce the biggest and baddest graphics card.
Very bravely indeed, AMD decided to reboot its fundamental strategy for graphics. Well, that's not quite how AMD put it, but you get the idea. AMD's graphics subdivision, ATI, found itself sinking fast aboard the failboat that was the graphics chip codenamed R600. It was a bloated, steaming, overheating disaster of a GPU, huge in proportions and cost but low on performance. Things reached a head with the launch of AMD's Radeon HD 2900 series in the summer of 2007. Power consumption, board sizes, pricing – everything seemed to be ballooning. After a decade or so of chasing ultra-high performance at all costs, things had gotten out of hand for the PC graphics industry
