As we have expected, ATI announced today two new graphics cards based on RADEON 8500 chips and equipped with 128MB graphics memory. Trying to pass ahead of NVIDIA, which will announce its new GeForce4 graphics family in two days and understanding pretty well that after the launching of GeForce4 its own new products will get much less attention, ATI had to undertake something. As a result, ATI couldn’t think of anything better than to provide its old graphics solutions with more memory, namely the RADEON 8500 working at 275MHz clock frequency and RADEON 8500LE working at 250MHz core clock. The recommended retail price for the 128MB RADEON 8500 (with VGA-, DVI- and S-Video Outs) is set equal to $299, and for the 128MB RADEON 8500LE - $199. The new products are expected to appear in retail in March.

At the same time ATI announced that they reduced the prices for their RADEON 7500 graphics solution: now it sells at $149. This way, the prices show that RADEON 7500 will compete with GeForce4 MX440, 128MB RADEON 8500LE will be in the same price group as GeForce4 MX460 and RADEON 8500 with 128MB memory will be a competitor to GeForce4 Ti4400. As for the top model, GeForce4 Ti4600, ATI can’t offer anything in response.

In the nearest future, ATI is going to launch two more graphics cards equipped with 128MB of memory. They will be RADEON 8500XT working at 300MHz and a solution known as RV250 working at 350MHz core clock. However, these solutions are very unlikely to allow ATI to compete with NVIDIA in the performance sector. The next generation chip, the 0.13micron R300 with 400MHz core and 400Mhz memory frequencies will be announced in mid Q2 (April-May) and it is exactly the one most likely to become a real rival to GeForce4 Ti4600.