R600XTX, the 1024 MB GDDR 4 card, has been pushed to the next quarter. This is just one in a series of ATI's failures, but of course DAAMIT will call this a strategic decision. R600XTX won't see the face of retail / etail stores till Q3 2007.

We know that something went wrong with the samples and that the there were some severe performance problems with the latest batch of GDDR 4 cards. Basically 512 MB DDR3 version with 1600 MHz memory was beating the GDDR4 version with 1024 MB of GDDR 4 memory clocked at 2200 MHz.

That cannot be good as the GDDR4 card is much more expensive to build or sell. The worst part is that there is no any big performance difference between 512 GDDR 3 card and 1024 MB GDDR. The trouble is that 1 GB of GDDR 4 at 2200 MHz costs you a lot of money, so ATI at least wants to save some money. It will launch this card after Geforce 8800 Ultra but remember, don’t expect too much.