Radeon 2 already in production?

It would make sense that production was underway if an introductory of the New Radeon2 card was going to happen world wide in September/October. Why ATI is remaining quite about it is very interesting since previously they usually had boards sent to a number of review sites for review. Either they have a knock out product which they don't want known to early because of fear of reduce sells of current boards or they are having problems which they want to iron out before committing themselves. Rule out the latter if the card is in production. Plus the new Radeon2 is built around DX8.1 which will be release with Windows XP. So I don't know if they will wait until then or actually ship it earlier using DX8.0a until DX8.1 is finalized. All the demos which uses the pixel shader 1.4 will require DX8.1, but OpenGL won't require it due to extensions that ATI already developed for the Pixel Shader. Also TrueForm using N-Patches depends on DX8.1. So maybe ATI is really waiting on MicroSoft and DX8.1.

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It is curious how very little information has slipped out.

I haven't read anything specific but I was beginning to feel that Radeon 2 wouldn't be available until 2002 so I was a little surprised to see the story. We will just have to wait and see but it seems likely that the Radeon 2 will be available much sooner than my "feeling".

I haven't seen any real information on new cards but if you were to ask me to guess it would be something like this.

Radeon 2 - real soon.
Geforce3 MX - Late Q3
Geforce3 Ultra - Early Q1'02
Next generation Geforce - 6-8 months after the introduction of XBox.
Kyro3 - Late Q2'02.

Keep in mind, except for the Radeon 2, I have no knowledge that any of these products actually exist. These are just my personal expectations.