Apparently there's been an ongoing antitrust lawsuit going on between ATi and Nvidia in 2006 but some recent evidence have turned up with an e-mail between Nvidia's Dan Vivoli to ATI's Dave Orton in 2002:

"I really think we should work harder together on the marketing front. As you and I have talked about, even though we are competitors, we have the common goal of making our category a well positioned, respected playing field. $5 and $8 stocks are a result of no respect."

This suggests that the two companies were fixing prices and releasing cards at the same time.

source: http://play.tm/wire/click/2015066

I don't see anything about fixing price in that email. if anything that email only indicate the two companies wanted to get together to improve the market share and such.

Yeah maybe they thought about it in 2002

I wouldn't be surprised if there is price fixing, its an oligopolistic market after all, so it wouldn't be hard to do.

i wouldn't be supprised either and it'd be nothing new, im not really bothered about this as for 1, i dont really think there's anything we can do about this anyway if they were, and 2, which is most important point, it doesn't really matter which graphics card you actually get, so long as it runs all your games good it doesn't really matter....

If this was true why would nvidia the giant let ati produce much better cards for cheaper?

"If this was true why would nvidia the giant let ati produce much better cards for cheaper?"

seems a little far fetched to me, its not in anyones interest for them to do that, as there is still ppl that will only buy nvidia cards, and ppl that will just get ATI cards, and on top of that, if you know your one of the best companies in the world at doing what your doing, its natural to just want to get rid of the competition not keep them around for revenue. ATI have been out of the loop on top end cards for a long time, but thats obviously because they've been working a long time on the new generation of ATI cards which as we now know, are looking to awesome!
Think this is just speculation personally

Companies are all about business. Not very surprising..

Never gonna happen. They will compete to death