Now that GeForce FX has broken cover (in reference form at least), as expected, the noise concerning ATI's refresh products in the form of RV350 and R350 has begun to rise. The emphasis is on the R350 based chip as this is the new high end part, expected to replace R300 and allow ATI to maintain the performance crown even in the face of GeForce FX. Whether this will happen is really anybody's guess as very little is known about the part, its configuration or changes from the original R300 architecture, other than it will be based on the same 150nm process as R300 – it would, however, seem a little foolish to start making 'performance' leadership noises if the part were to fall short.

Digit-Life has an article covering a Russian ATI even designed to highlight their intent in the Russian market, along with a number of board vendor partners. During the rounds of speeches and presentations it would appear that PowerColor spilled the beans on much of ATI's roadmap for 2003...
"When Mr. Edinger spoke in the morning the ATI's future plans were brought to the words Next Generation. But that idyl was destroyed by the next speech of a guy from CP Technology who presented the roadmap showing R350, RV350, R400 and their approximate implementation time. When the information was displayed the Vice President was taken aback at such straightforwardness. Nevertheless, I can inform you that the R350 based cards will appear in April this year, RV350 ones will come even a little earlier. Of course, this is just a plan and it can be corrected any time. The R400 is due to be released after July."
If Radeon 9700 PRO and 9500 PRO releases are anything to go by then it may be that we'll see ATI board versions well before other vendors start selling them.

Possibly of more interest though, is that it would appear that R400 sounds like its still on course for a Fall release. R400 is an entirely new architecture, which some are describing as 'hybrid' (possibly with reference to the shader pipeline's being unified in some sense) and is likely to support DirectX9's, currently unexposed, PS/VS3.0 functionality.