ATI R600: the rumours so far

ATI R600

Ever since nVidia introduced its GeForce 8800 GTX last November, which made it the first manufacturer to offer a DirectX 10 compatible videocard, all eyes have been on its rival ATI. Initially it was expected that ATI would also introduce a DirectX 10 successor to the Radeon X1950 series by the end of 2006, but its coming has been delayed to this very day. There are several reasons why ATI's newest GPU, codenamed R600, has been hit with setback after setback. For a while, it seemed that the new cards would come out half way through March. A launch event was planned in Amsterdam, and many journalists from around the world had their hands on invitations. However, several days ago AMD/ATI had made it clear that the event had been cancelled, and that the launch had been put back to "somewhere in the second quarter" due to "strategic reasons". We can only speculate as to what the real reason for the delay is; perhaps some major faults were found in the chip at the last minute, maybe it turned out to be more difficult to outperform the GeForce 8800 GTX by a significant margin, or maybe there could be problems with the apparently enormous power consumption of the R600. Meanwhile, no-one's any wiser as to when we will finally find ATI's new flagship product in stores. However, in the past few weeks, more R600-related information has come to light through the underground rumour mill. In this article, we will summarise all the rumours that we have been able to verify.

A possible photograph of the ATI R600 chip