RV635 and RV620 - Radeon HD 3600 and 3400 series preview

While ATI's Radeon HD 2000 series was anything but warmly received by much of the community, thanks to its combination of being late to the party and then forgetting to bring the proverbial bottle of wine we call 'performance' with it, the launch of the company's first refresh parts based around that architecture, RV670 (aka the Radeon HD 3850 and 3870) has thus far gained far more traction in the market.  Sure, it isn't perfect, and if we're honest it still lags behind NVIDIA's direct rival GeForce 8800 GT parts in the vast majority of situations, but thanks to its slightly superior pricing and cooler running nature, it gained a fair number of plaudits without even taking into account the fact that this was the first core on the market to sport DirectX 10.1 support, which may begin to become somewhat relevant once Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista gets a full, final release.

With this high-end release under their belt and an enthusiast level part, the Radeon HD 3870 X2, on its way in a matter of days, now is the time for AMD to turn their attentions to the rest of the graphics market, giving it the same Radeon HD 3000 series treatment in the hope of securing more market-share together with those more important OEM design wins.  In all honesty, some of the lower-end Radeon HD 2000 series boards were the diamonds in the rough of ATI's last generation line-up, thanks almost exclusively to the unimportance of anti-aliasing performance at those price points - So, can that trick be repeated, or even improved upon, this time around?  While we don't have any actual hardware samples for today's launches, we do at least know what is being brought to the table, so let's take this opportunity to have a look over the SKUs which make up ATI's low-end Radeon HD 3400 and mid-range Radeon HD 3600 line-ups.