We've learned that ATI sold around two million RV770 based cards, which is quite a large number especially as this was previously Nvidia’s dominant market.

ATI caught Nvidia off guard with the performance of RV770, as its GT200 with 192 Shaders branded as Geforce GTX 260 was not enough to beat ATI. With the new driver, GTX 260 with 216 Shaders has better chances, but it was still late to spoil ATI’s nice sales.

We’ve learned that the number or RV770 chips shipped is close to 2 million, but we are not sure if this is the number of only Radeon HD 4870/4850 cards or if it includes Radeon HD 4870 X2, the one with two RV770 chips.

Either way, this is a good result for ATI and it looks that the real battle is transition to 40nm scheduled for Q2 2009.