It seems that ATI’s engineers have gotten better. After the initial fiasco with R600, ATI shaped up and released RV670 and RV770 chips that got the company back on the track.

Now we have learned that RV710 and RV730, entry-level and mainstream chips will be released at least two months ahead of schedule.

This has caught Nvidia really off guard, as they hadn’t expected that ATI would have the real HD 4000 parts ready for pre-Xmas systems.

AMD is confident that many of these chips will end up in some of the Xmas OEM systems and these chips will offer quite a lot of performance for very little money.

Nvidia has 9500GT to compete with RV710, but we don’t know how these two are competing against each other. Initial reports implied that RV710 might end up faster, but this is something to be confirmed.