Gamers Depot has posted an interview with ATI. Eric Lundgren and Stan Ossias of the Canadian chipset manufacturer answer questions about the new Radeon 9000 and Radeon 9700 products which are new and exciting.

ATI has of course issued official press releases on their new cards. If you are interested here is Radeon 9000 one and 9700 press release.

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.

Well it looks like all the rumors about the next-gen ATI videocard are set to be confirmed or dispelled quite soon. The ATI Radeon 9700 is set to be launched tomorrow. There has been buzz within the industry among developers and other 'professionals' that this will be ATI's biggest shot in quite a while. Have a look see:

the new chips will offer considerably higher performance than Nvidia's current GeForce4 roster, giving ATI the edge with gamers as well as PC makers, analysts said. And even after Nvidia comes out with its GeForce 5 in a few months, the competition between the two will remain close.

This would be the card that DOOM3 was shown on at E3 btw.

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.