ATI Technologies faced strong competition when NVIDIA Corporation unveiled its GeForce 6800 GT graphics chip earlier this year, but the Markham, Ontario-based graphics company reportedly preps a counter-attack with a new product based on the RADEON X800 XT micro-architecture.

A report over China-based web-site GZeasy.com claims that the new graphics chip from ATI will be called RADEON X800 GT and will be a down-clocked RADEON X800 XT graphics processor with 16 rendering pipelines. The so-called RADEON X800 GT visual processing unit will function at 425MHz and will carry 256MB of GDDR3 memory clocked at 900MHz onboard. Initially the new RADEON X800 product will be offered for systems with AGP 8x port.

Some sources close to ATI expressed doubts that ATI would launch a part with “GT” brand-name.

Earlier ATI offered only two graphics options for the high-end market: ATI RADEON X800 PRO and ATI RADEON X800 XT with 12 and 16 pixel pipelines respectively. While the high-end RADEON X800 XT delivers performance in-line with competing GeForce 6800 Ultra, the RADEON X800 PRO was not as fast as the rivaling GeForce 6800 GT in quite some cases. To oppose NVIDIA’s “GT” part ATI might add a new SKU into its plans.

An ATI Technologies spokesperson in Oberhaching, Germany, declined to comment on the report.

Earlier this month ATI unveiled RADEON X800 SE graphics product with cut-down specifications to target OEMs. The RADEON X800 SE is available only in PCI Express x16 flavour.