Website timer suggests that ATI will launch the new Radeon X1800 on Wednesday, 5 October.

ATI has placed a timer on its website that's counting down to something. The counter indicates that something is 11 days 22 hours or so away, which takes us to 5 October.

Beneath the timer is an equation d/t = V, but there's no other indication as to what will take place when the timer hits zero.

It would be easy to imagine that ATI is preparing the launch of the X1800 or the equally anticipated - and similarly delayed - CrossFire.

If the time is indicating the X1800 launch, it will come almost a week after the product is supposed to arrive on store shelves. Earlier this week, ATI said TSMC had begun volume production of its 90nm chips, and that it expects the latest cards to begin arriving on store shelves by the end of September.

In addition to DirectX 9 Shader Model 3.0 support, the new GPUs are expected to support H.264 video decoding and are claimed to feature a unified shader architecture, although the latter has not been confirmed.