Introduced in August 2002 as third generation Radeon. It supports DirectX 9 and OpenGL 2.0 and was marketed as Visual Processing Unit (VPU).

The R300 was designed by ATi's west cost team and first used in the Radeon 9700 Pro. Although the R300 was also based on the 150nm manufacturing process, the architecture was different compared to it's predecessor. It has an 8 pixel pipeline design with each pipeline having 1 texture mapping unit. Texture combinations (one, two, three dimension with certain types of filtering) are part of the DirectX 9 specification and were made possible on the R300.

Performance-wise the Radeon 9700 Pro managed to beat the GeForce Ti4600 in many scenario's and would really show off when Anti-Aliasing (AA) was used. Driver-wise it took a while for ATi to get things straight, but it worked out eventually for the casual gamer.