Lately ATI Technologies not only became indisputable performance and features leader across broad range of real-time computer graphics market segments, but also changed its policy, improved drivers and software support and became a lot more aggressive than it used to be about two years ago. When the company unleashed its RADEON 9700 PRO in July, some considered it to be a “khalif for an hour”, keeping in mind that NVIDIA originally promised to reveal its NV30 ‘breakthrough’ GeForce FX VPU in late August or early September. Eventually, NVIDIA’s unit appeared to be “too advanced to implement” and ATI’s RADEON 9700 PRO will remain to be the most powerful graphics card until February, when NVIDIA and friends will bring the GeForce FX on the retail track. About six month lead on the high-end arena isn’t “an hour”, is it?

Rage3D web-site reports that Dave Orton, ATI'S COO had done an interview with CSFB and revealed a lot of interesting details about the company’s nearest future.

• ATI feels really confident against NVIDIA’s line of products in Spring. In case NVIDIA is not able to offer their simplified GeForce FX VPU edition by mid-March, ATI will be the only company to provide DirectX 9.0-supporting solutions across broad-range of market segments.
• Based on the Comdex Fall 2002 GeForce FX showcase, ATI is also satisfied with its own RADEON 9700 PRO. Depending on the market conditions, ATI Technologies plans to unveil the R350 (you may call it RADEON 10 000 for the time being if you would like) VPU in order to beat the GeForce FX heavily in terms of performance. The R350 based graphics processor will have some architecture optimisations that will stipulate higher core-clock speed. Some sources also allude that the R350 will have two texture units per pipeline, hence, there will be sixteen TMUs in this chip. Graphics cards powered by the mentioned VPU will be equipped with DDR-II memory (256-bit bus). In fact, ATI still decides whether to launch or not to launch the part: in case the competitor is not able to outperform the RADEON 9700 PRO really significantly, there will be not a lot of sense to launch anything new and lower the prices on the current products.
• The next-generation R400 VPU is said to be unveiled in Summer 2003.
• There is another mobile solution from ATI to come in Spring. According to ATI’s COO, the part is code-named M10 and supports DirectX 9.0 features.
• As always, ATI will utilise the RADEON 9700 PRO technologies across all the product families. In fact, this is already happening.
• ATI will make its best in order to continue the RADEON 9700 PRO leadership trend on the next generation families of VPUs, such as R400 and R500.
• At the moment ATI makes good progress on the mobile integrated core-logic field. According to them, they succeeded in capturing about 18% of the market, what is not surprising at all, given that there are almost no rivals for them there in terms of performance, capabilities and power consumption.
• Next Summer the company will also push their integrated chipsets on the desktop market. Since low-end graphics cards lose their popularity bit by bit, there is a lot of sense for ATI to offer its graphics solutions incorporated in chipsets.
• Expect ATI to perform massive expansion on the markets of handheld devices and digital TVs next Spring and Summer.

Well, ATI has come a long way and now is ready to fight for the top against NVIDIA. Make your bets, guys.