While at the Gadget Show Live 2010 press morning on the 7th, we had the opportunity to meet some representatives from graphics card manufacturer XFX and chatted with them a little bit about the recent comings and goings of the firm, including their dealings with nVidia.

There was a little bit of web controversy in recent weeks, when it was made known that the large GPU partner firm would not be receiving nVidia’s Fermi hardware at launch. This was supposed to be due to the fact that XFX had snubbed their long term pal nVidia by selling ATI’s most recent range of hardware: the 5 series. During our little chat with the fellows at the stand, some more information came to light about what was actually going on with these back and forth snubbings between the two firms.

When asked what they thought about the nose biting face operations of nVidia, the XFX rep said that the firm had had to make a choice several months before: go with ATI and have a nice revenue stream through the popular and only choice for DX11 hardware around (at the risk of annoying nVidia), or wait for the long in-development Fermi hardware while keeping nVidia on their side, hope that the latest hardware delivers. Evidently they went with the first one.

He backed this statement up saying that they’d gone with ATI in the end because during a cost/performance analysis they had concluded similar to what many industry analysts had been saying: that Fermi would be big, hot and very expensive. They were proved right it seems, as when Fermi hit the shelves it was ridiculously expensive and it still runs extremely hot. The GTX 470 may be the most powerful single GPU card available, but it costs an insane amount of money. The XFX rep put it in perspective quite well saying, “you can buy two ATI Radeon 5850s for the same money as a GTX 470, and in crossfire they’re more powerful!”