ATI, graphics product group of Advanced Micro Devices, is rumoured to be preparing a new ATI Radeon HD 3800-series graphics card aimed at mainstream market. The novelty will inherit processing capabilities of ATI Radeon HD 3850 and 3870, but its memory bandwidth will be dramatically lower.

ATI Radeon HD 3830 graphics cards will come with fully-fledged ATI RV670 graphics processing unit (GPU) with 320 unified shader processors, 16 texture units (TUs), 16 render back ends (RBEs) as well as all the other capabilities, such as universal video decoder (UVD), enabled, reports HKEPC web-site. However, the new graphics cards will use only 128-bit memory bus, which substantially lowers the cost of print-circuit board, but dramatically reduces performance in high resolutions.

At the moment AMD is reconsidering pricing of ATI Radeon HD 3000-series graphics cards and exact manufacturer suggested retail price of the model HD 3830 is unclear. It is logical to expect ATI Radeon HD 3830 256MB graphics boards to cost $100 - $130 and fill the gap between Nvidia GeForce 8600 GTS and 9600 GT.

AMD recently slashed the prices on its ATI Radeon HD 3850 and 3870 graphics cards when Nvidia unleashed its GeForce 9600 GT product. It is not clear whether sales of both ATI Radeon HD solutions started to increase after the price-cut, but what is obvious is that AMD presently has a gap between ATI Radeon HD 3650 GDDR3 ($99) and ATI Radeon HD 3850 ($169).

AMD did not comment on the news-story.