ATI, the graphics manufacturing division of AMD, has announced that it plans to allow third party manufacturers to design and produce their own graphics card boards to their own capacities for certain chips. Until now, ATI and NVIDIA have not sold their high-end chips directly to other manufacturers, instead choosing to make the cards under their own supervision using a contract manufacturer first. This, in theory, ensures that the quality of all their graphics cards is high for end consumers. Graphics board manufacturers should now have more freedom in how they build the cards, with the X1950XT being one of the GPUs they will be allowed to do this with. Although ATI will still supervise the board manufacturing process, their partners should have more breathing space to customise the cards.

Hopefully this move will see more choice for the end consumers because the boards will not be built to such a strict specification, although it could be at the cost of performance if some companies chose a low price over high quality. With any luck, ATI will still ensure that all the cards meet a high standard so consumers don't get cheated out of their money with sub-par products.