ATI limps, Nvidia tattles

If case you haven't been following the release of ATI's and Radeon X1000-series 3D cards, the latest is that despite alleged for-sale dates on October 5 for both new products, there's only been a slow trickle of availability. There also seems to be a disparity in pricing. This is all interesting, of course, but it's also been amusing how much Nvidia has been helping us stay on top on the info as it's developed.

Although ATI said its CrossFire cards would appear for sale on October 5 for $349, they didn't appear on shop.ati.com or NewEgg.com until October 7. As of today, the CrossFire X850 goes for $399 on ATI's site and on Newegg.com. Worse, no X1000-series Radeon cards show up on ATI's site, and Newegg has only the Radeon X1800 XL for $439, (incidentally, $10 below the MSRP). We were supposed to have almost all of the Radeon X1300 series available by now as well, but we haven't seen them anywhere.

This isn't the first time that ATI has flubbed or mislead on a release date, and the disparity hurts ATI's credibility moving forward. It also makes Nvidia look even better as GeForce 7800 GTX and 7800 GT cards were available in quantity on their own days of launch and at their suggested prices. ATI has said that the rest of the X1000-series cards will make it to market before the end of the year. We hope that's the case.

For Nvidia's part in all of this, we would like to thank its PR staff for all the e-mails regarding this information. We actually had been keeping up all by ourselves, but the help is always appreciated, especially when it's given with such enthusiasm and apparent glee.