The Canadian ATI Company, namely its CEO, proved that they are planning to release a chip based on R300 core but working at lower frequencies than those of RADEON 9700 are. The "new" GPU will be called RADEOM 9500. Its official launch is planned for mid August.

The decision to launch a slower R300 version was born by purely marketing reasons. ATI already has RV250 based RADEON 9000 and RADEON 9000 Pro chips targeted for the Value market. The graphics cards based on them are sold for $109 and $129 respectively. They also offer a High-End solution aka RADEON 9700 selling for $399. This way they appear to have no representation in the $200 price group, where their major competitor, NVIDIA, offers the whole range of solutions. This is exactly the reason why ATI decided to release this notorious RADEON 9500.

RADEON 9500 is expected to compete with NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4200, which is getting more and more popular lately and managed to oust from the market a more expensive GeForce4 Ti4400. according to NVIDIA, they are now shipping equal amounts of GeForce4 Ti4200 and MX4 440 chips, though the “MX” Value solutions from NVIDIA have always been more popular than the faster models. So, ATI expects RADEON 9500 to become popular as well.

We would also like to point out that ATI reps also made a slightly weird announcement that RADEON 9500 will differ from RADEON 9700 not only in the working frequencies. Although this is really hard to believe, RADEON 9500 will have cut down features compared with the original R300 and different layout, which will force graphics card makers to use new PCBs for RADEON 9500 based solutions.