ATI R350 in Mass Production

ATI R350 in Mass Production

While nVidia are expected to delay, just a little bit longer, the availability of the GFX, ATI are reported to have its competition, the R350, in mass producton. nVidia's offering will still have a brief lead since it is expected to be available from around February 20th. ATI's R350 chip will be released as the Radeon 9900 Pro and will be announced at the CeBit show in Hannover, Germany on March 12, 2003. It is expected to retail in April of this year while in many ways it will resemble an overclocked R300.

Although, due to the extreme competitive conditions, details of the new ATI card are guarded closely, some information about the product has seen the light of day.

It is known that the chip will debut with a core clock of 375 MHz and will support DirectX 9.1 while it will feature eight rendering pipelines and two texture units per pipeline and be developed on the 150 nanometre process. The card will be equipped with 128 MB's of memory but will support 256MB as well. A recent rumour claimed that the new board will only utilize DDR I but ATI have confirmed that the card will also support DDR II and will be made available with it when pricing issues are resolved.

So nVidia's GFX will be released in the end of February while ATI's answer is expected in April, things are getting hotter.