ATi R520 launch will see immediate product availability

[Steve]

Remember the 7800GTX launch? Remember the NDA us journalists and retailers were under, preventing us from saying anything more than "yeah, we've got something really cool here, but we can't really tell you about it yet"? NVIDIA pulled off a great move in making their 7800GTX available on the day it was launched. According to CoolTechZone ATi are going to do the same with R520:

According to an insider, ATI is aware of NVIDIA’s strategy and knows the negative impact it could have on its corporate image and financial position if it tried to do another paper launch. The insider reported that ATI could’ve released its R520 at Computex (or even when NVIDIA announced its G70 GPU), if it intended. But one of the key reasons for waiting until August (hopefully) is that it wants to make sure the cards are available for purchase exactly when the R520 core is introduced. Therefore, you can expect the availability of the R520 to be immediate.

Still, it doesn't make up for 7800GTX being out a few months before it and then there's the gap between SLI and the still unavailable CrossFire, that ATi blamed in part for its last financial results.

[mike_w]

Still, it doesn't make up for 7800GTX being out a few months before it and then there's the gap between SLI and the still unavailable CrossFire, that ATi blamed in part for its last financial results.

Perhaps more important though is when the cards start to fall in price. Most people won't be buying the cards until they start to become cheaper, so if ATi's new offering (who wants to place bets on names? X900?) has decent performance and becomes cheap quickly enough, they should be able to recover lost ground. Of course, that's still assuming that the performance is that good!