WHEN ATI officially announced that the new Radeon 9800 Pro would use DDR-I, many people wondered if it could compete with Nvidia's Geforce FX and its DDR-II memory. In hindsight, ATI's use of DDR-I will enable them to ship more boards with more memory at a lower price. Currently DDR-II chips above 400MHz are in short supply, which means high prices. Indeed, the Geforce FX is still nowhere in sight. However, Nvidia's choice makes sense for them considering that they need faster RAM because their memory controller only supports a 128-bit interface, leaving them at a major bandwidth disadvantage. Their faster RAM helps to make up the difference.
ATI's Radeon 9700 and 9800 cards all use a 256-bit interface. Although 256-bit DDR-II chips are available, they too are in short supply and extremely expensive. ATI had a fully working Radeon 9800 with a DDR-II memory controller in the labs a few months ago, and of course has already ATI demonstrated a Radeon 9700 Pro back in October 2002 with a DDR-II interface.
Now, at least one major ATI Add-In-Board (AIB) partner is considering the use of DDR-II chips to provide them with the performance crown. As ATI and Nvidia know, having the top graphics card means prestige and more sales of the bread and butter consumer cards.
News source: The Inq
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