NVIDIA really took everyone by surprise when its 7800 GTX was in stock at various retailers on the launch date. After what NVIDIA and ATI had done with their last generation GPUs, no one really thought that NVIDIA could pull off something of this magnitude. Making sure that its board partners are ready with their products on the announcement day requires immense efforts in organizing everything. Needless to say, NVIDIA has really gotten into the "good books" of numerous enthusiasts and the rest of the industry with what it accomplished. The performance of the 7800 GTX is no surprise at this point either. Not only does the 7800 GTX perform exceptionally well at standard resolutions, but it also manages to unveil impressive frame rates at resolutions as high as 2048x1536. Furthermore, it’s definitely a step up from NVIDIA and ATI’s last generation offerings. Now that we have seen what NVIDIA brought to the market, the excitement still remains unfulfilling until ATI’s R520 is released. With NVIDIA’s well-polished announcement of its GeForce 7 series, ATI has work cut out for them if they want to remain competitive. Since the industry is tired with the numerous paper launches both GPU makers pulled off earlier, it’s demanding not only performance, but also timely availability of retail products. NVIDIA really set the bar high for ATI by making its GeForce 7 cards available on the same day. Now that NVIDIA has successfully accomplished that, users are expecting the same from ATI. And from it appears, this may well very happen with the 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. Until then, all we can do is wait, wait and wait… Source: CoolTechZone
