New line of ATI

[Evdawg]

Whens the next going to come out after the 9800XT? imo, never buy the xt... overclock the 9800pro a tiny bit and you have yourself the same performance. But anyways, point is... XT isnt enough of a boost to call an upgrade. Nvidias Answer was the 5950. When will the new ati card come out and what will it be called? Do you think this will be a big performance jump? I still remember when the 9700 came out, i was in shock for 2 months at the performance

 

[Lonyo]

R420, beginnging of next year (March maybe?) with PS/VS 3.0.

It may or may not be a big performance jump, it's not possible to tell, but I'm guessing it will be fairly big (R100 was original Radeon (7xxx) then jump to R200 (8500) then R300 (9xxx series)) and the jump between 8xxx and 9xxx was fairly hefty, so it might follow than R300 to R420 will be quite big. But it's not a certainty, and we can't tell until we get some official specs and information, rather than speculation.

 

[Pete]

Yes, the next high-end cards by both ATi and nV will be big jumps over the current high-end cards if current rumors are correct (ATi R420 = 12x1, nV NV40 = 8x2). Both should be available next Spring.

I'm not expecting as big a leap as from the 4600 to the 9700 Pro, though. I don't think we'll see >2x the performance in AA+AF situations with the future cards, but they should offer a significant speed boost in severly fillrate- and bandwidth-limited situations (in the area of 1.5x).