If there is a shortage in the market, then ATI and Nvidia are the first ones to know. So we went directly to the PR departments of both companies and asked for their view of the current supply and demand situation for high-end graphics cards.

Chris Evenden, PR Director for ATI, told us back in July that "thousands of X800s" are shipping every month, "in line with a typical high-end product launch." He pointed out that the X800 launch was different, since there was additional and overwhelming demand created by the transition to PCI Express and "the lack of competing products at the ultra-high-end." As a result, demand turned out to be greater than supply.

Evenden said, $499 cards such as the X800 XT PE "are never really available in 'large' quantities." Therefore, he expected the X800 PRO cards to be seen in large quantities with the PE cards being available in smaller quantities.

In a recent update, Evenden confirmed that yields for X800 chips were "fine" and "better than expectations." Supply was still tight, but caused by the number of wafer starts, not so much the yield per wafer. "Unfortunately, asking for more wafer starts now won't help, since it takes around 12 weeks for a chip on a wafer to turn up on a board in retail," Evenden explained. Despite the high demand for X800 cards, he believes that ATI is fulfilling about "3/4 of the demand for X800s at the moment."

In the case of the X800 XT PE, Evenden spoke of a "real card": "We're shipping a lot of them." He also said that ATI now has "a lot of different cards aimed at the high-end user, so it's natural that we have less of each one."

Nvidia has a similar story. Back in July, spokesperson Brian Burke told us that demand for the 6800 Ultra "has been very high" and that Nvidia was shipping these GPUs "in volume". Various partners were "shipping boards as fast as they can build them." Burke also mentioned that volume availability depended on the "production ramp and retail commitments."

Nvidia's PR Director Derek Perez confirmed to us in September that "the entire announced 6-series line-up is available now" and was shipping either to retail or OEMs. This line-up included the GeForce models 6800, 6800 GT, 6800 Ultra, 6600 and 6600 GT. According to Perez, retail and e-tail had landed on the 6800 GT as their preferred product, with the Ultras mainly going to system builders and OEMs.

Nvidia did not reply to our recent inquiries on the current status of availability of the 6800 series.

In summary, both manufacturers admitted strong demand which may have caused some sort of shortage here and there. But overall, we were left with the impression that higher-end cards should be available for customers, if they spent some time looking.