ATI Technologies, a successful developer of visual and multimedia processors, and its partners among makers of graphics cards have started to sell products based on the latest RADEON X700 visual processing units to end customers.

A number of US, European and Asian retailers have begin to sell the RADEON X700 PRO graphics cards with 256MB of DDR memory, D-Sub, DVI-I and TV-Out connectors from variety of makers, including ATI, Club3D, Connect3D and Sapphire Technology. Large USA-based retailers, such as ZipZoomFly.com, Newegg.com, maintain recommended price by ATI Technologies of $199 for the RADEON X700 PRO product.

Markham, Ontario-based ATI Technologies offers a number of flavours of its mainstream PCI Express x16 graphics processor RADEON X700 – X700 XT, X700 PRO and X700 – that differ by performance and price.

The 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.

ATI promised its add-in card partners would supply the first batch of the RADEON X700 PRO graphics cards to the market in late September, 2004. Though, none stores posted availability of the product at that time.

More powerful RADEON X700 XT graphics cards are said to be available later this month. However, a source close to ATI Technologies said that the company would only rate A2 revision of its code-named RV410 graphics processor to run at 475MHz speeds, which corresponds to ATI’s RADEON X700 XT model.