Just as we finished this group test, we managed to get hold of some reference designs for the forthcoming cards from Nvidia and ATI. As there seem to be so many looming on the horizon we thought we would take stock of these new chipsets. Here's what's in the (pixel) pipeline. You can see benchmarks for them on the 'Performance results' page.

· ATI Radeon 9800 PRO

The fastest graphics card available out of the box at the present time. Uses the new R350 core, an updated version of the R300 - the Radeon 9700 PRO - with improved pixel shaders and improvements to the SmoothVision and HyperZ technologies. The memory and core speeds have been increased to 380MHz core and 340 MHz (680DDR) memory. As per the 9700 PRO it uses a 256-bit memory bus and has 8 pixel pielines.

· ATI Radeon 9600 PRO

The Radeon 9600 series will eventually replace the 9500 series. Uses the RV350 VPU, ATI's first 0.13 micron chip. Has only four pixel pipelines (the 9500 PRO has eight) but has some of the feature enhancements of the R350. Core clock runs at 400MHz while the memory runs at 300MHz (600DDR).

· Nvidia FX5800 Ultra (NV30)

The long awaited answer to ATI's Radeon 9700 series. Most significant is the die size, which has shrunk down from the Ti4600's 0.15 micron to 0.13 micron, with 128 million transistors. Lowering the die size will allow for higher core frequencies in future releases. It also uses 128MB of DDR II SDRAM memory running at 500MHz doubled pumped, so effectively the memory is running at 1GHz with a 500Mhz core speed. Also introduced is the CineFX engine to tackle DirectX 9. It has 8 pixel pipelines, dual 400MHz RAMDACS and is AGP 8X compliant.

· Nvidia FX5600 Ultra (NV31)

A cut-down version of the FX5800 Ultra, still built on a 0.13 micron core but with only 80 million transistors and using 128MB standard DDR memory. It has only 4 pixel pipelines. The memory runs at 400MHz with a core speed of 350MHz

· Nvidia FX5200 Ultra (NV34)

Built on a 0.15 micron core, the FX5200 Ultra uses standard DDR memory as per the FX5600 Ultra, with a core speed of 325MHz.