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ATI Radeon 2: more specs leak

Latest data at odds with other posts

Some interesting ATI Radeon 2 specs have appeared on the Web, but we're sceptical.

According to a posting at French site Puces 3D, the Radeon 2 will be based on a 350MHz core equipped with six rendering pipelines, contain a programmable vertex shader and support DirectX 8.1. The chip will be fabbed at 0.15 micron.

Cards based on the Radeon 2, the site's posting says, will support AGP 2x and 4x, and ATI's HydraVision multi-display technology. The first such product will ship at the end of next month for $300.

Some of that contradicts what we've heard. The last spec we read had the Radeon 2 chip, codenamed the R200, will run at 250MHz, support four rendering pipelines.

ATI itself has already announced Truform, its new rendering technology. And the Radeon's two rendering engines - the Charisma Engine and Pixel Tapestry Architecture - are ready to be updated for the DirectX 8 era as programmable vertex and pixel shaders, respectively.

The company has also said that R200 will ship "late summer". Puces 3D's date of late July seems early to us, but then it is an OEM date, not a retail release schedule, so it's not entirely at odds with our information.

Our specs match quite closely with those published over at Rage3D, and HydraVision support and 0.15 micron process technology are consistent across all three sets of specs.

We wonder if Puces 3D's data is a mixture of R200 and R300 - the Radeon 3? - specs. R300 is believed to have eight pipelines and will run at 300MHz or above. R300 is at least a year away, however.

And Rage3D notes that "many of the features that were previously for the R300 core were bumped up to the R200 core, thus delaying it from it's initial expected Q1 2001 launch date". ®

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Related Links

Puces 3D: ATI rumours
Rage3D: ATI Radeon 2 Speculation Grows

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