Having started shipping its graphics chips to third manufacturers about a year ago, ATI managed to prove quite successful. At present the number of ATI partners is no smaller than the number of NVIDIA’s adherents and this quantity keeps growing. ATI appeared quite popular among those mainboard makers, which are going into the VGA business. For instance, at the Computex show in Taipei I saw the first steps in the graphics business made by the server solutions maker – TYAN.

TYAN has already announced their desire to enter the graphics card business. For example, they are one of the major partners of VIA Technologies working on the new S3 Savage XP based solutions and their promotion in the VGA market. At the same time, TYAN will be offering a graphics card family built on ATI chips. the companies, ATI and TYAN, will announce their partnership only at the official launch of the new generation 3D graphics accelerators from ATI: R300 and RV250, because TYAN will be releasing solutions based on them.

At present TYAN has already prepared several graphics cards on RV250 and R300 for mass production. I dare make this conclusion because I could see a graphics card based on RV250 showcased at the Computex show this year. It is called TACHYON G5000.

This card will be equipped with 64MB DDR SDRAM and will feature a D-Sub, DVI and TV-Out. It will certainly support HydraVision technology.

By the way, according to our sources, ATI and its partners have already made the first mass pieces of the RV250 based graphics cards and now these cards lie in stock waiting for the right time to come to light.