In the latest leg of a fiercely competitive race with arch rival Nvidia Corp., ATI is claiming technical superiority with its Radeon X800, Radeon X600 and Radeon X300 chips, which range from high-end to large-volume mainstream markets.

The stakes could be high as PC manufacturers move to incorporate PCI Express in coming months and then pick updated graphics cards.

ATI worked on the chips for almost three years with Intel Corp., which is expected to announce PCI Express chip set later in June, the first manufacturer to use the technology.

"It is pushing the envelope because it is very complex technology," ATI chief executive Dave Orton said in an interview. "We wanted to line up the transition of our new products with the transition of this new interface."

The high-end X800 graphics chip will sell to the sub-$800 market, the mainstream X600 in the sub-$300 market and the X300 in the sub-$130 market.

ATI's newest line of chips has been designed to incorporate the PCI Express standard, while Nvidia has opted to use a bridge between the old and new standards.

The result, Orton said, is ATI technology that "shows off the full capabilities of PCI Express, and it won't burden the technologies from a cost or power standpoint."  That means more bandwidth, or bigger "pipes" to carry data, and power management, the company says.

"Pretty much across the board, we can sweep the design wins," Orton said.  "These products continue to keep the ball rolling in ATI's favour."

Markham-based ATI made the announcement at Computex, a major PC trade show in Taiwan.  It demonstrated real-time high definition video editing on a PCI Express platform in February.

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