After seeing this post by our good buddy Fudo on Fudzilla we decided to make a few calls ourselves. XFX spoke to KitGuru this morning and have confirmed that they are focusing completely on AMD graphics cards from this point onwards. This will not come as a shock to many people, as relationships have been strained between the companies since XFX started producing AMD graphics cards last year. KitGuru predicted long term problems, many months ago.

XFX say will give us a quote later today, however when we asked nVidia about the situation their response was quick and to the point “We have no comment”.

Even though nVidia would never admit it, this is a huge blow to the green team. XFX have a fantastic reputation in the industry among discerning enthusiast circles, after all how many companies would have the ability to come up with custom designed, overclocked HD5970 with 4GB of ram shipping in a gun shaped box?

So what does this mean? Well you can be sure that when the new HD6800 range hit that XFX will have some very sexy custom designs shipping alongside Sapphire’s.

Initially when news hit a while ago that XFX might not be creating any Fermi cards, the response across the net was very passionate indeed.

“XFX are without doubt one of the finest graphics card manufacturers on the planet and when they announced they were going to sell ATI graphics card, many analysts and journo’s wondered how it would work. After all nVidia are well known to be rather temperamental and difficult to work with on a variety of levels, even at the best of times.” August 20th, 2010 – Author Slyvia, KitGuru.

“Nvidia is punishing this highly successful brand by cutting them off from Geforce GTX 480 and 470 launch cards, and this is a direct result of XFX’s last year’s decision to start selling ATI.” Abazovic, F. Austria. 30 March 2010.

Many XFX consumers doubted XFX had been left out of Fermi allocation, refusing to believe that the Green Team would behave in such a manner:

“It’s kind of stupid for nVidia to “punish” the people who are actually getting their products to the market.” FoxMontage 2010-08-20 Fudzilla.

Surely the green team would not have such an outrageous disregard of the channel and of their consumers? Surely they would not ignore the gaming community and the thousands of forum posts by those who still continue to ask for XFX designed gaming-centric models using Fermi? Surely they would not reject all of these indicators and continue to go alone and all-in to penalize XFX? Sylvia from KitGuru believed they would: “It seems that nVidia have burned their bridges with XFX which is a shame because the public have been demanding XFX branded Fermi cards for quite some time.”

“If it’s true, that’s really crazy. They must think their new chip is the equivalent of a gift from heaven.

I’m not sure it’s true though – there are other AIBs that sell cards from both chip manufacturers that seem to have allocation (eg: Asus, Gigabyte, MSI) – so why punish just XFX?” GheeTsar 30-03-2010, Hexus forums.

XFX provide a reliable product support, the best of the best service, and have always been a credit to the graphics card industry, so what could possibly have put them on the receiving end of such a heavy and very personal approach?

“The exact reasoning behind this is not clear but in the shady world of GPUs, very few things can be said with any certainty and we will probably never know. One way or another, this is a blow for NVIDIA and their fans.” SKYMTL— March 29th, 2010 HardwareCanucks

KitGuru says: With the latest loss of XFX, one of their biggest partners and with BFG’s departure from the market a while ago we wonder what nVidia have planned in the coming months.

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