Well guys, just made my way home from the ATI Radeon announcement. It looks like the rumors going around about ATI finally having a contender for the top of the market is a reality. You can check out the full press release here. Here's some of the juice:

- Most advanced graphics chip ever designed, featuring 30 million transistors, in an .18 micron technology, giving it a higher transistor count than CPUs such as the Pentium III and Athlon.
- First chip to support up to 128MB of double-data rate (DDR) memory at 200MHz
- First graphics chip to break through the Gigatexel barrier with an awesome 1.5 Gigatexel per second rendering engine.

A few notes I took while attending the launch party down here in New Orleans for you guys:

- OEM shipping in June, retail shipping this summer
- The 1.5 gigatexel number is achieved through "HyperZ" Z-buffer compression technology. The actual physical throughput is 1.2 gigatexels, but the compression squeezes a bit more performance equivalent to 1.5.
- 200mhz core speed.

Lastly, you guys wanna see some previews of the card right? Here are a few for you to look at. iXBT, HotHardware, SharkyExtreme , and FiringSquad. Oh yeah, and I actually got a hold of a benchmark of the card, on a 866mhz P3 box running at 1280x1024 in Quake3, it cranked out about 56fps. That is on drivers several months away from release. We can expect 'substantial' increaes in performance I've been told.