Well as many of you guys probably remember a little while back at WinHEC (Dig my cool pictorial!) 3 videocards were shown off. The NVidia GeForce2, 3dfx V5-6000, and ATI Radeon. We kinda got what was expected with the NVidia and 3dfx boards and most people blew off the ATI card since after all, it's ATI. I wouldnt be so sure though, the guys at chip.de (Thanks HardOCP) have gotten a hold of an underclocked version of the Radeon which is performing quite well:

First surprise at Q3A: The underclocked Radeon beat our Geforce-1-DDR card! With a 12-percent-under-par frequency it couldn't compete with Geforce-2 and Voodoo-5/5500, though. Exception: At 1.600 x 1.200 and 32 Bit color depth it beat the Voodoo-5-5500, too.

Of course, we dont have any details on system specs or resolutions used etc, but a 12% underclocked card beating out a GeForceDDR card is certainly something worth investigating. here's a quick chart for comparison sake:

As was mentioned over the weekend, fill rate isnt everything. Memory bandwidth is becoming more of an issue now that cards are running so fast and it looks like ATI at 8GB/sec (according to their press release) is right in the middle of things.

update by Maarten: The guys at GA-Hardware got in contact with ATI about this preview, and it seems ATI isn't too pleased about it. They are saying

- ATI has not released any boards for testing. The testing was done on a board that was obtained through irregular channels.
- The A11 is at least two versions behind the RADEON that will ship.
- The shipping RADEON will have higher clock speeds and far more mature drivers.
- The board and tests used by Chip Online Review have no validity.