ATI may be gearing up to announce its R5xx family of next-generation graphics chips, but that hasn't stopped unveiling parts based on the previous generation of its technology.

The company yesterday unwrapped the Radeon X800 GTO, a 12-pipeline chip that sits between then X800 XL and X800 XT. It supports GDDR 3 memory clocked at up to 1GHz effective and installed on a 256-bit bus. ATI didn't provide a core clock speed, but it's believed to be around 400MHz.

As per other X800 chips, the GTO supports the latest incarnations of ATI's SmartShader, SmoothVision, Videoshader and HyperZ technologies, along with its 3Dc normal-map compression system. Again, it's a Shader Model 2.0 part.

ATI said the X800 GTO was available immediately, and will be included on graphics cards produced by ATI itself and by Abit, Asustek, Connect Components, Diamond Multimedia, Gigabyte, Hightech, Info-Tek, MSI, Palit, Sapphire, Tul and Visiontek. ®