ATI RADEON 7500

[Keefe]

Riva Station has posted their review of the Radeon 7500 which come clocked at a blazing 290/460 core/mem configuration!!  Let's see how this new kid on the block stacks up to NVIDIA's offerings:  

Its chances for success aren’t bad at all, judging from the card’s specs and feature list. The revamped and tuned RADEON core is now manufactured on a 0,15µ process, allowing the integration of TV-Out and a second RAMDAC as well as a major increase in clockspeed to an astounding 290MHz! On top of that, the card will ship with 64MB 128Bit DDR-SDRAM consisting of 4ns chips. Speedwise, the memory takes its cue from the GF2 Ultra and the GF3 and will run at 460MHz. The real clincher, however, is the price. ATi is planning to introduce this card at a comparatively low DM 399.- or $199 (official ATI recommended sale prices), which amounts to a declaration of war against the current market leader NVIDIA.
While ATi’s "little" 7500 definitely won’t be able to threaten NVIDIA’s heavyweight GeForce 3, that’s not its mission anyway. That’s a job for the upcoming 8500, which will bring SmartShader technology to the fray. This relegates the 7500 to another feature and performance class, as the new nomenclature already indicates. The 7 in the name denotes the DirectX generation the card is from. Thus, 7xxx=DirectX7. The following number denotes the performance level. The new system is meant to put an end to the confusion caused by the different retail and OEM versions of the original RADEON, which differed in memory and core clockspeeds. Should a slower OEM version be released, it would most likely be named 7400 or something like that to make it easily identifiable and prevent mix-ups. Which bings us to another important point: The 7500 / RV200 core is not the eagerly anticipated new RADEON version with SmartShader, Truform and Smoothvision technologies

ATI RADEON 7500