Both ATI and Microsoft executives are absolutely refusing to answer questions on the Xbox successor, but that didn’t stop us in our mission to be the “Insider’s Choice for Xbox Information.”

We’re proud to bring you today the very first info on the Xbox 2 GPU. Our highly placed source within the industry informed us that the graphic technology powering the Xbox successor is a derivative of the R500, the successor of the R420 to be unveiled later this year at Comdex.

This graphic chip has been in design for longer than a year at ATI’s Marlborough, Mass. office and much like the Xbox’s nVIDIA GPU, the Xbox 2 graphic chip will also be a custom silicon that will have the R500 as its core technology.

This graphic chip is aimed at the next version of the DirectX API, most probably called DirectX 10, which is already in development and simply code named: DirectX/LH. LH stands for Longhorn, the next major desktop Windows release, which will follow Windows XP.