ATI's R300 set to burn rubber at 315Mhz

Grabbed this news from Warp2search. Looks like ATI is definately making a strong move with the R300 (The Inquirer dubs it the Radeon 9700). Things are really going to heat up again between Nvidia and ATI!

As a quick aside, I'm honestly tired of the 3DMark reference. I'm sure there are those of you out there who think like me when they see "15,000 3DMarks" and go, "Whoopee! Who cares?". I'd rather base my decision on some real life performance. (ie. not benchmarks!)

ATI'S RADEON 9700 will be introduced very soon now and we have some performance information that we can share with you.

ATI, as well as its partners, is very optimistic about this card and now it seems we can say their optimism in not unfounded.

With eight pipelines, the card will deliver very nice performance figures and we learned that it should be clocked at 315MHz, which is obviously the fastest speed that ATI can guarantee to its partners. We are sure that the company will also introduce cards clocked at lower speeds, under a slightly different name, though we expect the LE label to be dropped.

We expect ATI to use an Nvidia-style number nomenclature and to add some kind of number instead of the unsexy LE on the name of its cards.

Anyhow, don't forget that all that Matrox could manage with its Paraphernalia was 220MHz and their chip is far less complex than ATI's one. 300MHz seems to be the magical barrier for the 150 nanometer process and ATI was able to pass just above that. Nvidia planned to use this speed with its Geforce 4 TI 4600, we understand, but then, before launch, decided to stick with 300MHz.

As for performance, we learned that cards based on the 9700 should deliver a magnificent 15,000 3DMarks and will be able to beat Nvidia's fastest offering for this summer by a few thousand in this very popular test. Nvidia's best performance is between 10,000 and 11,000 depending on the configuration.

Since we learned that the first reviews will appear after the official presentation we can still only wonder whether ATI will be able to deliver these cards in September as planned. In the past, missing delivery-date promises has been ATI's prime problem.

News source: warp2search.net