MANY SCEPTICS and Doubting Thomases were sceptical whether ATI"s R300 would arrive on time, and wouldn"t let their brain cells buy into the mysterious 107 million trannie chip which we told you all about at Computex in early June, and told you quite a bit about before – lest the nay-sayers forget.
For the first time ever ATI has delivered what it promised, a Geforce 4 TI 4600 killer. This just shows that if you try hard enough you can come up with something decent. But ATI"s R300 arrived at a bad time for Nvidia, as its NV30 beast is still being developed as it rushes to meet its "holiday season" target.
Nvidia"s answer are some new chips, NV18 and then, a little later, the NV28 nothing more than AGP 8X and one more nice feature that no one has reported so far. With no differences in clock speeds this type of card will not be any kind of answer to the Radeon 9700 Pro or the Radeon 9000 Pro, but it will be some kind of refreshment to show that the company is alive and ready to kick butt. When NV30 arrives.
NV30 could be dethroned by R350, the 0.13µ (micron) Spring refreshment of R300 core, perhaps called the Radeon 10000, while the situation will change yet again with NV35 – a faster version of NV30. And so on. Everything has changed with ATI stronger than anytime before, but this will just make things more interesting and can actually help to speed up the advance of the marchitecture.