The Inquirer is still convinced that ATI's R300 will be introduced this week (I've heard otherwise), and in anticipation of this announcement, they have posted some more details on the new chipset. One of the things mentioned is that despite the need for a power connector, the Radeon 9700 card will run without one. It'll just run slower.

The Inquirer has received some more "insider" info on the Radeon 9700 videocard that ATI will be introducing soon. As you might remember this is the card that ran DOOM 3 at E3. According to The Inquirer, the card will be clocked at 315Mhz and should be able to get a 15,000 score in 3D Marks. The ATI Radeon 9700 should hopefully be out by September. Also, for those of you in the comments speculating about the Radeon 8500 MAXX with dual GPUs, HardOCP has word from ATI on this card, denying it's being made.

Some pics of the next-gen ATI cards the R250 and R300. Rumor has it these things are like fast and stuff and will actually be at the top of the benchmark party. Thanks HardOCP

According to certain sources at The Inquirer, ATI's upcoming R300 will have 128-bit color precision. 128-bit precision is part of the DirectX9 specification, which means the NV30 will also support it. Thanks Games.

I see on The Inquirer that some Chinese site has ATI Powerpoint slides posted showing some info on the ATI R300 chipset. Though I don't see it, a July 17 debut date is apparently mentioned.

ATI has had a pretty bad reputation when it comes to drivers. Looking to improve this reputation, ATI is now following Nvidia's lead by picking a special name for their drivers: Catalyst. These driver releases should now come more often, and help performance of the cards.HardOCP and Tech-Report both have reports with benchmarks. Here's a snip from what HardOCP had to say.

ATI is changing, that much we think we can all agree on. They are more aggressive than ever in getting the end user what they want. They had serious driver problems in the past, but it is safe to say those problems are gone...for the moment. While the Radeon 8500 was not a GeForce3 killer at its introduction because of driver implementation, it's certainly closer to that now. If ATI could have implemented such robust drivers at the market launch of the 8500, the video card landscape might be a bit different from today. In fact, the 8500 is riding right up on the GeForce4 Ti 4200's heels. If you've been reluctant in the past to try out the 8500 because of driver problems, you may want to give it another shot now days. The 8500 can be found for bargain basement prices and it really delivers beyond bargain basement performance.

Related to all this driver fun, is this Inquirer article about NVidia and 3D Mark results. Hm...

The Inquirer is doing some reporting about the next-gen ATI parts. The R300 and RV250 should be out sometime late this summer, supposedly a few months before NVidia's next GPU (October or November is what they say). NVidia's NV30 has taped out though. As for the ATI 300 part, it's expected there will be a $399 loaded version of the videocard along with a cheaper Light version. ATI has come pretty close to NVidia in performance lately, think they'll finally have a card that beats NVidia?

The ATI 300 will support DirectX 9.0, will have as many as 107 million transistors, and have eight pipes with 16 textures. It will include 4 vertex shader engines, and use 256-bit DDR memory, and use a technology called HyperZ III.
We also expect that the R300 will support AGP8X, be out before Direct X9.0 and support it, include both MPEG 2 encoding and decoding, video acceleration and the rest. <snip> It will support 128MB of DDR, VGA, DVI-I and VO, but we believe that ATI will introduce an R300 Light (LE) which will be aimed more at the meanstream market.

Some pics can be seen at Legion Hardware.

anónimo let us know ATI released some new Radeon drivers. You can grab drivers for WinXP, Win2k and Win98/ME. And it's actually just a 6mb download now (down from 14mb).

Following NVidia and their nForce chipset, ATI is looking to get into the PC chipsets market. By midyear, they hope to have five Radeon IGP integrated chipsets, with models including desktop and notebook versions for the Pentium4 as well as the Athlon.

Kyle @ HardOCP took a visit with the ATI folks and had a look at a sick piece of mobile hardware. A laptop computer with a 1.7GHz chip and an ATI Radeon 7500 mobility. Finally a laptop that is worthy of lan parties? According so some benchmarks linked in the comments the GeForce2Go works fairly well, but the Radeon card here seems to blow it away. But then again there is the pending unknown quantity that is the GF42go from the NVidia folks.

Hey look at that, ATI has released new Radeon drivers. Grab the Windows XP or Windows 2000 ones. Again these are pretty big (up to 14mb) thanks to all kinds of language packs and such.

Larsson let us know ATI has posted a new Radeon beta driver (14.22mb). There are release notes though they don't provide any insight into what has been improved.

The Inquirer has posted some details about ATI's upcoming R300 chipset with DirectX9 support. This should be their NVidia N25 (GeForce 4) killer, while the RV250 should beat the N17. Besides being faster (though NVidia hasn't even announced the GeForce 4), ATI is also saying their card should be cheaper. Samples of the chipset go out to ATI partners in about 2 weeks. Thanks NukeDukem.

According to this report, the folks at ATI have managed to score 21 different card companies to leave NVidia and come play with them recently. They however dont have any listing of how many companies have left ATI to go play with NVidia such as Apple recently.

ATI and Hercules today announced they have formed a strategic partnership which means Hercules will be selling videocards equipped with the ATI Radeon All-in-Wonder chips. At first they'll be selling these cards in Europe, with cards shipping in February.

There's an ATI interview on Higherzone, answering 8 questions sent in by the site's readers. The Q's are about the clockspeed of the 8500DV, the licensing of ATI chips to other chip makers, new drivers, widescreen TV support for tv-out, and if they anticipate incompatability with the nForce motherboards. Thanks VE.

ATI has released four new screensavers for those with a Radeon 8500 card. These make use of DirectX 8.1 and Smartshader, and all of them are a few megs in download size.

NVidia has always posted those demos where you could see the features of the GeForce1/2/3 being shown off, and now ATI has done the same for the Radeon 8500. This page on the ATI site has four demos ranging in download size from 5 to 30mb, showing the use of Truform and Smartshader. Three more demos are on the way too.

As expected, the new ATI Radeon 8500 drivers have been released. You can get them for Windows 2000, Windows XP and Win9x/ME. These drivers offer Smoothvision anti-aliasing and better performance. Thanks Crimsonbeak.

AnandTech has whipped up a new article looking at the performance of ATI's latest drivers for the Radeon 8500. AnandTech puts the Radeon 8500 against the GeForce 3 Ti500. Among other things, the new drivers now fix the Quake 3 image quality "bug", and support SMOOTHVISION (anti-aliasing). In a lot of games, the Radeon gets pretty damn close to the GeForce 3 now although in games like Unreal Tournament the GeForce 3 blows the Radeon away (though at a 1600x1200 resolution). When it comes to AA support, ATI can now compete with NVidia as well

The inclusion of SMOOTHVISION proves that the technology is superior to anything else we've seen out there on both a performance quality level. Unfortunately the drivers aren't flawless and there still are random bugs. While ATI has done their best to list any incompatible games or other scenarios in the driver release notes, they can't change the reality of not being able to test on every person's system. The drivers are still not up to par with NVIDIA's Detonator series from a stability standpoint but it's good to see ATI actively addressing their problems.
According to ATI we should begin to see a regular flow of beta drivers from ATI on a much more frequent basis (possibly every few weeks?).

AnandTech also mentions these new drivers should be released today.