ATI will offer HL2 free

[Slogun]

MARKHAM, Ontario--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 30, 2003-- ATI Technologies Inc. (TSX: ATY, NASDAQ: ATYT) today announced that Valve®, a leading game developer, has named ATI as the preferred graphics card partner for its upcoming game Half-Life® 2. As a part of this agreement with Valve, ATI customers will get the full Half-Life 2 game free(a) with the purchase of select RADEON(TM) products.

Read more here.

I've been waiting for news about this.

And a bit more from Ati.com:

"Special Offer:
If you thought that was the end of the awesome news?read on! When you buy the new RADEON? 9800 XT or RADEON? 9600 XT you will get a FREE copy of Half-Life® 2! "

 

[jimmyl930]

Cool. Are the XT's the slower versions? When are they coming out?

Thanks.

 

[Slogun]

"The Radeon 9800 XT is based on ATI's R360 chip, which is essentially a minor revision of the R350 chip used in the Radeon 9800 Pro. The chip is still fabbed by TMSC using 0.15-micron process technology. ATI has modified R360 silicon in order to clean up some trouble areas and to allow for higher clock speeds. Beyond that, the R360 has all the familiar R350 features, including support for floating-point pixel formats, programmable shaders, and F-buffer logic that enables longer shader programs without conventional multipass rendering. With the tweaks, the Radeon 9800 XT has reached new highs: a 412MHz core clock speed with an effective 730MHz clock speed on its DDR memory. That's just a step or two up from the 380/700MHz core and memory speeds of the 9800 Pro 256MB.

Other changes from the Radeon 9800 Pro to the XT are similarly simple. The 9800 XT card is a new circuit board design, visibly distinct from the 9800 Pro 256MB. Also, to keep the R360 chip cool at its higher clock speeds, the Radeon 9800 XT comes stock with a fancy new copper cooler."

Review

I can't say that even with a HL2 "bundle" it is worth $500.
I'll probably pick up a 9800 Pro 128MB card for $350 or less, was hoping for a "bundle" on that too.
Remember, these AGP cards are gonna be completely obsolete for those of us who go for PCI Xpress before long.

 

[Sid59]

XT is faster .. THG has some benchies up. the benchies also include past radeon 9800 pro, 9700 pro , 9600 pro etc and a few FX Nvidia cards.

 

[BD231]

500 bucks aint free man.

 

[Slogun]

Free if you were gonna spend $500 anyway