ATI's RV 250 lost in space

ATI TOLD US at the CeBIT conference earlier this year that it was about to introduce its RV250 mainstream part but it seems that ATI got the jitters because of its big chipset rollout and postponed its introduction.

Then it told us the RV250 would probably appear in April but now we're close to the end of May and it could as well be on Sirius 3.

The value cards, using the RV250, were possibly to be called the Radeon 8800 - and we know for a fact that the chip has taped out and the cards were just about ready even back in early March.

But this particular delay might be one of the great Marketing Mysteries of the 21st century.

Perhaps ATI might introduce the RV250 in tandem with the DirectX9 R300.

The RV250 is only supported by Direct X8.1 and this wouldn't do the ATI Radeon 7500 much good, locked as it is in a fight-to-the-death struggle with the Nvidia Geforce 4MX.

Perhaps just for as long as the Radeon 7500 sells well, ATI will keep the RV250 genie in its bottle, and we expect Nvidia to perform a similar trick with the Geforce 4TI 4200, introduced in April and in very limited supplies indeed, even a month after its introduction.

We've also heard an Eva Glass style whisper that ATI is working on one more card codenamed the RV280 that we will speak about again, but that's likely to be supported by AGP 8X too.

When ATI does finally to retrieve the RV250 from Arcturus or wherever it's lurking, we expect an almighty scrap between it and Nvidia. These guys just love to hate each other. µ

* We even heard that some executives at Nvidia won't have Gamecubes in their houses because they use ATI technology. As Eva G might say: "sheesh".