Graphics battle: Nvidia GeForce FX vs. ATI R350 in the next few weeks

Despite various market rumors, Nvidia said it has not changed its plans to ship its GeForce FX products in early February. Faced with this upcoming competition, ATI Technologies recently revealed that it would release its long-planned R350 chips in the next few weeks to keep its leading position in product specifications.According to sources, the top-end, desktop-version chip in the GeForce FX series will be named GeForce FX 5800 Ultra. Designed with a clock frequency of 500MHz and the DDRII memory standard, the new GeForce FX 5800 Ultra reportedly delivers better performance than Nvidia???????ˉs current high-end GeForce4 Ti 4600 as well as ATI???????ˉs Radeon 9700 PRO.

Responding to the rising threat from Nvidia, ATI is planning to introduce its R350 chips as well as the more simplified RV350 shortly to brace itself. To ensure a better yield rate and cheaper sales price, ATI said that the R350 chips will be manufactured on the more mature 0.15-micron process and use lower-cost, 10-layer PCBs for the supporting graphics cards.

According to some benchmarks, the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra performs 10% better than the Radeon 9700 PRO, ATI said, but it is also true that Nvidia???????ˉs new chip requires greater power consumption. Its new R350, however, will feature low power consumption, with which ATI hopes to target both the desktop and notebook markets at the same time.

ATI gave no more details about the R350 and RV350, but stressed that the products will be designed with leading-edge specifications. Meanwhile, in addition to the high-end chips, ATI said that its new-generation, mainstream-level RV280 would make its debut at the CeBIT Hannover trade show in March and hit the market shortly afterwards. An updated version of its Radeon 9000 (RV250) chip with AGP 8x graphics support, ATI???????ˉs RV280 will be manufactured by United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) using 0.15-micron processing.

Source : DigiTime