News ATI poised to 'regain' (?) channel leadership

We have just seen an interesting slide from a recent presentation that ATI held with some of its partners. There are several tidbits of information in the slide, that first showed up on HKEPC Hardware.



The performance scale suggests that R520 will not be a great deal faster than the current crop of ATI's high-end products, namely the R480 and R430 - Radeon X850 XT PE, Radeon X850 XT and Radeon X800 XL. However, we do believe that the GPU will have a considerably larger featureset than the ageing R300-based R4xx series products. That may come across a little harsh, but the R4xx series GPU's were nothing more than an extension to ATI's fantastically robust R300 architecture that was released over 2 1/2 years ago.

The second interesting part of the slide suggests that we will see big improvements in performance on the mainstream video cards that are set to arrive in the third quarter. We anticipate that the new mainstream video cards will fall in between the performance of Radeon X800 (a 12-pipeline part), and Radeon X800 XL, which we had a look at not too long ago.

There is also a tidbit of information about ATI's Kaleidoscope architecture, which looks to be a hardware video decoder that is located on chip, much like NVIDIA's PureVideo. We just hope that Kaleidoscope works a little better than PureVideo did on the NV40/45, where certain video formats did not receive the performance boost that were possible with other NVIDIA GeForce 6 series GPU's.

However, the most interesting part of the slide is the phrase at the bottom, which states:

'Regaining Channel Leadership'​

Is this an admission that ATI lost the battle this time around? It certainly looks that way. In saying that, the clash of the titans has been a very fiercely fought battle this time around, with both IHV's coming up with great products. It just seems that NVIDIA managed to hit the right price at the right time, and thus, sold a hell of a lot of GeForce 6800 GT's.