ATI last native AGP chip (RV351) to be unleashed in Q4 2004

The Inquirer reports that in the fourth quarter of this year ATI will launch its last native AGP graphics chip, the RV351. This will be a competitor to the NVIDIA NV44 AGP. After the RV351 ATI will continue to launch AGP versions of its cards as long as there is demand for, but these chips will be PCI Express chips bridged to AGP with ATI's RIALTO bridge chip.

The RV351 AGP card is aimed to replace the Radeon 9200 cards and will be a direct representative of ATI's X300 PCI Express cards. The price of cards based on this chip will be below $100.

I expect it to have four pipelines and two vertex Shader units to work with 128 bit DDR 1 memory and to be clocked at close to 300/400 MHz. As always it's possible to expect LE version that will possibly be crippled to use 64 bit memory.

We expect to see this card in Q4 while it will have just introduced NV43-V, Geforce 6200 and later NV44 chips from Nvidia as direct competitors.

Source: The Inquirer