For those of you who are itching to get their hands on a 9800xt or 9800pro, you may want to wait a few months. Radeon announced some specs that you might want to pay attention to.
Taken from
www.anandtech.com, the following is a spec sheet on the next generation Radeons coming down the pipe.
R420 and R423 at the High End
We have been hearing about R420 for quite some time now and recently the name R423 has been in the headlines. As you can guess, R420 is the AGP successor to the R350 (Radeon 9800) while R423 is a PCIe (PCI Express) version of the R420. The specs on the two GPUs are as follows:
0.13-micron low-k manufacturing process
160M transistors
~500MHz core clock
8 pipe design
6 vertex engines
Improvements to all of the basic architectural features (shader engines, AA, etc...)
256MB 256-bit GDDR3 (~1GHz data rate)
Single slot design
The R420/423 chips will offer twice the pixel fill rate and vertex throughput of the R350 core, as well as increases in memory bandwidth. Initial indications show that there may be two versions of the R420/423 with different memory clocks; one design calls for ~1GHz GDDR3 memory while the other calls for slower DDR1 memory.
It isn't clear whether R423 (PCIe) based designs will eventually carry higher clock speeds than their AGP counterparts, but there is a definite possibility.
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It appears that the r420 will be available in the 2nd quarter of 2004. More info can be found
here.