As NVIDIA’s CEO himself (does he know about all our NDAs?) told all of us last week during the quarterly conference call, his corporation launches its improved version of the GeForce FX 5800 GPU, the code-named NV35 graphics processor, this week. The chip will bring leadership position back to NVIDIA, Jen-Hsun Huang said. The arch-rival company ATI Technologies, who has been doing quite well for the last calendar year, definitely does not want to give the leader’s crown to its Santa Clara neighbour and today unleashed a 256MB version of its RADEON 9800 PRO graphics card.

ATI RADEON 9800 PRO graphics card and other such graphics cards sold under brand-names of ATI’s AIB partners are based on the same RADEON 9800 PRO aka R350 graphics core with eight rendering pipelines, four parallel geometry engines and support for ATI’s technologies like SMARTSHADER 2.1, SMOOTHVISION 2.1, HYPER Z III+ and so on.

As far as I currently know, ATI RADEON 9800 PRO graphics card with 256MB of DDR SDRAM will have almost the same clock-speeds as the same product with 128MB of memory – 380MHz for the VPU and 700MHz for 256-bit DDR SDRAM memory (680MHz for 128MB version).

HotHardware web-site has already published a review of the RADEON 9800 PRO 256MB DDR SDRAM over here. The device is definitely a bit faster than the RADEON 9800 PRO with 128MB of memory, sometimes outperforms the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra, but sometimes is behind it. There are some doubts concerning the fact that the RADEON 9800 PRO with 256MB of DDR SDRAM memory will be able to beat the NV35, however, now we know how ATI Technologies answers on NVIDIA’s new GPU.

The RADEON 9800 PRO 256MB graphics card is available in limited quantities to OEM, retail and online customers for $499.