Well here comes that ATI Radeon 9700 card as well as a new budget card, the Radeon 9000. We're expecting just a handful of previews of this card today but the first ones out the gate look pretty promising handily beating out the top GeForce4 cards by NVidia. Most benchmarks really stretching the lead at the higher resolutions. Some of the more impressive 1600x1200 score differences: Quake3: 35% faster while the ATI card ran with 16XAF and the GF4 didn't have AF on, SeriousSamSE: 50% faster, Unreal Tournament 2003 in 1600x1200: 54% faster.

- HardOCP 9700 (white paper), 9700 (benchmarks), and 9000
- AnandTech 9700 and 9000
- TomsHardware 9700 and 9000
- GameSpy interview

Yeah so NVidia is gonna come stomp this card with a GeForce5 right? Well not so fast. Word is that the NVidia folks are experiencing a delay on the NV30 and it in fact looks like it wont be out until the end of this year. Actually here's a quote from AnandTech on that:

NV30 won’t be out anytime soon. The 0.13-micron chip has been delayed a bit and the current word is that a November release can be expected, with boards shipping shortly thereafter.

It appears that even a 2.4GHz P4 machine makes things CPU-bound at the lower resolutions. Hopefully we'll see Kyle overclock some system like mad to try and push the card a bit harder.

As for availability and pricing, the Radeon 9700 should be out in August (There will be cards from ATI and its partners). The card will ship with 128mb of RAM, along with DVI-I, VGA and TV-out connectors. MSRP is $399. The Radeon 9000 and Radeon 9000 PRO are already shipping.