A number of sites are reporting today that ATI has decided to change specs of its upcoming R420 part that is only a few weeks away from actual launch. Much like in previous chip designs, the R420 seems to be scalable in terms of the pixel pipelines that can be enabled. While known specs hinted for a while that the R420 was going to be a 8-12 pipelines part, new leaked information indicates that ATI will be boosting new Radeons performance by enabling all 16 pipelines from scratch...

ATI Technologies’ chip known as R420 will be called RADEON X800 PRO and is likely to be launched on the 26th of April, 2004. Higher-speed flavour of the R420 – the RADEON X800 XT – is expected to debut on the 31st of May, 2004, if the assumptions posted earlier this week are correct. PCI Express x16 solution powered by the R423 architecture will see the light of the day on the 14th of June. ATI on Tuesday began marketing campaign on its web-site to support the launch of the new graphics architecture.