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R300 and RV250 Coming Soon!

by Anna Filatova
06/19/2002 | 12:53 AM

At the past Computex show in Taipei a lot of info about the upcoming ATI chips aka RV250 and R300 has penetrated into the on-line and off-line media. However, today the last doubt about the product specification are about to vanish completely. This Chinese page has a couple of slides from ATI’s presentation where both new products are described in great detail.

Having studied the presentation and added a couple of things we have already known, I would like to offer you a complete credible picture. Here are the specs for R300 for instance:

0.15micron manufacturing technology, the chip will be produced by TSMC;
350Mhz core frequency, 400Mhz+ memory frequency (DDR SDRAM);
8 rendering pipelines with 2 TMUs each (16 TMUs is a DirectX9 requirement);
Peak T&L performance – 150 million triangles per second;
Vertex Shaders 2.06, Pixel Shaders 2.0. Some sources claim there will be 4-pipeline vertex shader;
Full DirectX9 compatibility;
High quality anti-aliasing and new more complex higher order surface support;
HyperZ III;
HydraVision;
Hardware MPEG-1/2/4 and DVD decoding (hardware motion compensation and DCT/IDCT).

This way, R300 will become the first graphics accelerator compliant with DirectX9. To commemorate this fact R300 family will be called RADEON 9xxx. As our sources claim, the launch is scheduled for August 10.<%BANNER[article]%>

Together with R300, which is targeted for High-Performance sector, ATI will launch a mainstream solution aka RV250. The cards based on it are most likely to be called RADEON 8800 and will represent a slightly modified RADEON 8500. Even the manufacturing technology remains unchanged: RV250 will be also made by TSMC with 0.15micron process, but the working frequencies will grow up to 300MHz. we have been waiting for solutions like that for a long time already, but the thing is that they will be positioned for the mainstream market and as a result should sell at around $150.

We should also say that RV250 will look very attractive as it will be the first mass solution with Pixel and Vertex Shaders.

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