ATI Technologies introduced Tuesday its new series of visual processing units aimed at the mainstream price sector of add-in graphics cards and personal computers. By releasing the novelty, ATI catches up with the rival NVIDIA who released its innovative GPU with new architecture for mainstream market earlier this month.

ATI Rides 0.11 Micron Technology

The new RADEON X700 graphics processor aka RV410 is made using 0.11 micron process technology at TSMC and consists of 110 million of transistors. The chip has 8 pixel pipelines and 6 vertex pipelines, yielding more complex specifications compared to previous mainstream visual processing units by ATI Technologies. The RADEON X700-series supports innovative technologies found in the RADEON X800 family of visual processing units unveiled earlier this year, such as Shader Model 2.0b and 3Dc.

Earlier this month the web faced massive array of reviews covering the world’s first mainstream graphics processor with the modern architecture for PCI Express bus – NVIDIA’s GeForce 6600 GT.

“Designed for Games”

“The RADEON X700 has been designed to deliver amazing gaming performance in all of today’s popular games,” said Rick Bergman, Senior Vice President and General Manager, PC Business Unit, ATI Technologies.

X-bit labs and web-site has issued two articles covering various aspects of the RADEON X700 architecture as well as performance in some of today’s top 3D games and found performance of the top-of-the-range X700 XT part “respectable”.

ATI is releasing its new graphics processor along with an updated CATALYST driver that includes new CATALYST AI functionality. The new implementation of the unified driver is called CATALYST AI and is going to boost the performance of graphics cards based on ATI’s RADEON chips in games employing a dynamic optimization of texture filtering and application-specific optimizations.

Available “Soon”

The RADEON X700 family will include the RADEON X700 XT, the RADEON X700 PRO and the RADEON X700, with a variety of memory configurations and speeds to meet the wide range of needs of customers looking for a visual processor for gaming, streaming video, digital photo editing and other visually demanding activities. ATI claims that RADEON X700 products will be available for $149 - $199 in the USA.

The RADEON X700 PRO is now shipping. Products are claimed to be available soon from ATI and a stellar line-up of graphics card manufacturers including ABIT, ASUS, Connect3D, Diamond Multimedia, Gigabyte, High-Tech, ITC, MSI, Palit, Sapphire, Tul, Visiontek and YUAN. The RADEON X700 XT and RADEON X700 will ship next month.