ATI Technologies started to ship its RADEON 9800 PRO with 256MB of DDR-II SDRAM memory graphics card as an answer to the paper-launched GeForce FX 5900-series of GPUs yesterday, however, the Markham, Ontario-based chip design house will reportedly launch another incrementally improved version of its R3xx architecture processors this Summer.

As The Inquirer has found out in a Chinese news-paper over here, ATI Technologies already has its code-named RV360 and R360 GPUs taped-out at TSMC. The new graphics chips are made using 0.13 and 0.15 manufacturing technology and will be made in high volumes. The company will reportedly ship the novelties in July, so, the actual graphics cards may appear in August.

Given that the VPUs from ATI will come shortly based on the report, we can suppose that the chips will have very little differences from their predecessors, but will definitely boast with higher-clock speeds to beat NVIDIA’s GeForce FX 5900-series in high-end as well as GeForce FX 5600 and maybe even 5200-series in mainstream and low-end segments.

As we know, ATI’s RADEON 9800 PRO 256MB is sometimes a little bit slower than the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, but sometimes it manages to outperform the latter. Since ATI Technologies now does not want to be beaten by NVIDIA Corporation anywhere, it may launch another overclocked version of the R3xx VPU for another astonishing $499 per graphics card.

One more critical task for ATI is to offer an inexpensive DirectX 9.0 solution to compete with the GeForce FX 5200 and to replace the RADEON 9000/9200-series eventually. As a result, ATI’s code-named RV360 chip may either be a lower-end version of the RADEON 9600, or something that is more powerful than the mentioned VPU targeted on the GeForce FX 5600 Ultra.

It is a bit strange that ATI wants to offer different versions of its VPUs in very short timeframes (less than 6 months), there are some doubts in economic expediency of such move, however, I believe ATI knows what it is doing. Anyway, keep in mind that this is unofficial information.