ATI leaks details of Rage 128 Pro

ATI operatives have spilled the beans on the company's upcoming Rage 128 Pro accelerator chip, successor to the current Rage 128, which has been boosting the company's profits lately. According to Maximum PC magazine, an ATI guy, speaking at WinHEC 99, claimed the new chip would will run at 125MHz and above, and sport anisotropic filtering and DirectX 6 texture compression. That's in addition to the Rage 128's current 128-bit dual-pipeline architecture, 32-bit z-buffer, 32-bit rendering and support for up to 32MB of on-card VRAM. The news comes immediately after nVidia announced that its next Riva TNT accelerator would provide on-card lighting and transform acceleration (see nVidia claims graphics breakthrough), and it's possible ATI's 'leak' was a spoiling tactic. The Rage 128 Pro should begin to appear on add-in cards in July, supporting AGP 2x and 4x, plus all the flat-panel display support, DVD decoding and video out options favoured by ATI at the moment. ®