Whats the next ATi Card coming out and when?

(points to the topic title)

That's kind of why I was hoping for some information on nVidia/ATi's next offerings. If they're not out by late February/early March, then I guess I'll just go with a 6800 Ultra.

If the Asus A8N-SLI is out by then, as well as PCI-e version of the 6800 Ultra, and they're both reasonably priced, then I'll go with that so I can add a second card on later.

 

After the R480 refresh, ATI's next card will be the R520, which (according to a company presentation) will support WGF 1.0 (DirectX 9x), and be available in time for Microsoft's first Longhorn Beta test in Spring 2005.

 

SLI doesn't look that appealing to me as it will only work if the game is specifically supported by the driver and some games will never work because of the way they access the frame buffer or something similar. Wait for the R480 just to see what ATI can pull out of the hat. In a strange way the thing that appeals to me about the R480 is that its only going to have a 20mhz core increase ( afaik ) over the XT PE, so there must be some other change to allow a speed increase worthy of a new product. Or it will just be a solution allowing ATI to increase yields, which will be totally boring :/

 

I thought the 480 denoted the card was pci-e.

 

Yes the R480 is PCIe, however it's rumoured (no official confirmation) that ATI will offer a Rialto "bridged" AGP version sometime in Q1/2005. My guess is that moving forward ATI will do this with all their new graphics processors until AGP is finally fazed out altogether.