by Anna Filatova
02/04/2002 | 02:26 PM
As we expect, in the nearest future ATI and its partners will start announcing different graphics cards based on RADEON 8500 chips and equipped with 128MB DDR SDRAM.
ATI can’t disregard the fact that its major competitor, NVIDIA, is about to launch a new GeForce4 family. Especially taking into account that ATI will hardly be able to announce its new R300 chip in the nearest future. According to the most optimistic forecasts, the 0.13micron R300, which is supposed to work at 350MHz-400MHz frequency, as the specs say, may be announced only in April-May 2002. Nevertheless, ATI can reproduce one of the GeForce4 features today already in its RADEON 8500 based solutions, namely the ability to support 128MB of memory. That is why we expect a lot of RADEON 8500 based products equipped with 128MB DDR SDRAM to come soon.<%BANNER[article]%>
Actually, one graphics card like that was announced some time ago. One of ATI’s partners, Joytech Company has recently announced a new product called Devil Monster II Radeon 8500LE Pro based on 250MHz RADEON 8500LE and provided with 128MB memory. The specifications of this product are available at the manufacturer’s web-site.
Of course, this is only the beginning. In the nearest future we will see graphics cards built on faster RADEON 8500 chips and featuring 128MB memory onboard from ATI and its partners. These solutions may be based on the regular RADEON 8500 working at 275MHz, RADEON 8500XT working at 300MHz and RV250 chips working at 350MHz, which should be announced at CeBIT. We would like to remind you that RADEON 8500, RADEON 8500XT and RV250 chips are based on the same architectures and differ only by the chip working frequency. As for the graphics cards on these chips, 128MB memory will become a reference features for them.