For a while now, we"ve been suggesting that ATI"s R300 would be called the Radeon 10000. We were close, but can be accused of jumping the gun a little, I guess. We learned today that the card that should be introduced as soon as the middle of this month and will be named differently.
The R300 will be called Radeon 9700, where the 9 stands for DirectX 9 support and the 700 could be memory speed, we imagine, or maybe 9700 simply sounds better than 4600, which Nvidia uses for their Geforce 4.
Radeon 10000 will be the label for the next R300, which will be introduced as soon as November and which will be produced using 0.13 micron technology. And it"s likely be faster as well.
So, the NV30 will have a 0.13 micron mate to compete with and we will bring you more on this as soon as this summer ends and we get more details.