Even though the highly-anticipated DirectX 10-compliant graphics card lineup from ATI, graphics product group of Advanced Micro Devices, was late to market, its derivatives do not seem to be going to: code-named ATI RV670 product is already knocking the door and promises to offer even better functions amid lower price.

Add-in-card partners of AMD recently started to sell ATI Radeon HD 2900 Pro graphics card for under $300, essentially killing sales of dual-chip ATI Radeon HD X2 and making the high-end performance available at an affordable price. But later this year the code-named RV670 product will offer an even better balance of performance, price, power consumption and features, if a slide, presumably from an AMD presentation, published by Expreview web-site is to be believed.

According to the slide, ATI Radeon HD 2000-series graphics cards based on ATI RV670 graphics processing units (GPUs) will offer “R600 performance with better thermal and power” along with DirectX 10.1 with shader model 4.1 functionality, universal video decoder (UVD) as well as PCI Express 2.0 and DisplayPort interfaces support.

Image by Expreview

The ATI RV670 chip will be produced using 55nm process technology at TSMC and will have 320 unified shader processors, the same amount as found on the ATI R600 GPU as well as ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT/Pro graphics cards. It is unclear whether the RV670 will continue to have 512-bit memory bus, or AMD will shrink it to 256-bit, but will improve efficiency of render back ends (RBEs) and boost the speed of GDDR4 memory chips. The second option is preferable, as it allows to make graphics cards considerably easier and cheaper to produce.

The new graphics chip will also support double precision floating point, something which is needed for certain general purpose computing tasks, but is not crucially required for graphics processing.

It is currently supposed that AMD is on track to deliver the ATI RV670-based products onto the market in November, though, the world’s No. 2 supplier of x86 central processing units may postpone the launch of the new graphics products till it makes available its highly-anticipated AMD Phenom FX processors in December in order to roll out a “gaming platform”. It also remains unknown whether AMD plans to release ATI code-named R680 product.

Official from AMD did not comment on the news-story.