Ati finished sampling its first series of R600 chipsets. The upcoming GPU has a number of new features making it a worthy competitor for G80. We don't know exactly what the final clocks are or what the exact number of pixel and vertex shaders are but we do know two things. First there's the fact that it will support DirectX 10 in probably the same manor that G80 does and that could mean 128-bit HDR with AA and AF enabled. And then there's the fact that R600 has to compete against G80 series which turns out to be pretty hard due to its impressive bandwidth and memory size. 64 unified shaders seem unimpressive now, don't they?

To complicate things even more, actually the release plan of R600 is already five months late since the final product was expected to emerge in early 2006. Still, they already possess some engineering samples, most of them having already been shipped to VIP integrators. As a reminder, Nvidia was already producing samples of G80 from September. Make a quick comparison and you will get the idea. Ati has been seriously left behind by its competitor, and they probably will lose some more ground with G80 being already available.