ATI : on R300 Performance and Schedule

by Anna Filatova
04/12/2002 | 02:04 AM

Our friends from ReactorCritical site managed to interview Mr. Pierre Laine from ATi, who told them some very interesting news about the next chip aka R300:

• According to Mr. Laine, "R300 will be a lot more powerful compared to the RADEON 8500 and if you remember the gap between the original RADEON, you can expect the same between the RADEON 8500 and R300". Therefore, the rumors about 8 rendering pipelines with 2 TMUs on each seem to make sense for R300 (RADEON – 2 rendering pipelines with 3 TMUs each, with the third TMU being kind of "excessive"; R200 – 4 rendering pipelines with 2 TMUs each).
• Also Mr. Laine confirmed that ATI products life cycle makes from 9 to 12 months which means that like last time the new ATI chip is most likely to come in the end of spring or beginning of summer, and the cards based on it are most likely to come out in autumn, as we have actually expected.