"ATI to launch RV410 soon, rival for NIVDIA's GeForce 6600"

According to a Chinese website ATI will soon announce a graphics card that will rival the NVIDIA GeForce 6600-series which were launched last week. ATI's RV410 is said to resemble NVIDIA's higher-end part of the GeForce 6600 familiy in terms of specifications.

ATI's new chip would have 8 pixel pipelines, 6 vertex pipelines and native support for PCI Express x16. The technology feature list will resemble the Radeon X800 series and will feature stuff as Shader Model 2.0b, 3Dc and other.

The website reports that the higher-end part of the RV410-serie would have a 500MHz core and 1000MHz memory.

Earlier this year it was reported that ATI RV410 visual processing unit would be made at TSMC using 0.11 micron fabrication process. Thin manufacturing process enables lower cost and potentially higher clock-speeds of complex chips, such as graphics processors.

NVIDIA’s mainstream GeForce 6600 family of graphics processing units formally announced last week and proclaimed “the Doom III GPU” are also manufactured using TSMC’s 0.11 micron process technology, feature native PCI Express support, pack in 8 pixel and 4 vertex pipelines as well as inherit feature-set of the GeForce 6800 family of chips.

Graphics cards based on the GeForce 6600 GT and GeForce 6600 will be available in September, for a price of $199 in the US and 229EUR in the EU. The price of the RV410 from ATI is expected to be in the same range, but it is unclear when the company will launch this product.

Source: X-bit Labs