ATI graphics cards reach market

Radeon 9600 Pro set to capitalise on nVidia product delays

ATI is hoping to capitalise on nVidia product delays with the announcement that it has started volume shipments of its new Radeon 9600 Pro graphics chips, which it launched in March.

The Radeon 9600 Pro, which supports Microsoft's new DirectX 9.0 and the latest OpenGL feature sets, is a mainstream, performance graphics card and is expected to be priced at about £150.

ATI has claimed the graphics chip, which is based on a 0.13 micron manufacturing process, can be run at high clock speeds and high resolutions with minimal cooling and without sacrificing playable frame rates.

UK system builders can expect to get their hands on cards soon, although it is expected that there will not be enough to satisfy demand for another month or so.

Peter Stern, sales director at ATI's largest UK distributor, Realtime Distribution, said: "We have our first delivery arriving at the end of this week. We are getting lots of calls about them and we are just trying to control demand for the first few hundred cards.

"We will see more allocation in the next four to six weeks, when customers can expect to see cards arrive en masse."

Stern added: "We are still struggling to get some of the other chipsets from both ATI and nVidia. We have seen only a smattering of Radeon 9800s Pros but we hope that stock will increase over the coming months. We are in the quietest months of the year and things will pick up in June and July."

ATI's foundry partner, TSMC, has taken much of the credit for getting the 0.13 micron-based chip to market. Rick Hegberg, senior vice president worldwide sales at ATI, said: "With the launch of the Radeon 9600 Pro, we relied heavily on our manufacturing partner, TSMC.

"The TSMC 0.13 micron process enables us to run the chip at high clock speeds with low power, giving users full image quality at full speed, all the time."