ATI cards are inexpensive for two reasons:

- The dies are physically smaller, which is a principle dictator of unit cost for silicon. They get more done with less silicon.

- The nVidia brand is bigger. Overall, I'd expect nVidia to do well even if their products were obviously inferior. ATI and nVidia are pretty close with the current batch of hardware. This is just like how people would continue buying Intel CPUs even if they were inferior, just like during the Athlon 64 vs P4 days. They can charge more. We do see this in both the CPU and GPU arenas with Intel products offering similar performance to an AMD part usually costing more. Likewise with nVidia and ATI GPUs.