LOSTCIRCUITS

The Event

"There are days when you need smoke and mirrors and there are days where you don't need them and today is one of them", said Paul Ayscough, senior director of corporate marketing, to start the morning session with a single bald statement to describe "the most important progress in the PC graphics business since the invention of texture mapping in the 1990ies". It turned out a prologue to the unveiling of the "first simulation of virtual reality instead of emulation" by means of the first Visual Processing Unit (VPU), even though this term was coined originally by 3DLabs a few weeks ago.

Paul Ayscough opens the event

The product strategy behind the technology is like everywhere else the combination of Technology Leadership, Strategic Partnership (AMD, Intel, Mac) and performance leadership as not only the road to success but also the key to survival in the cut throat business that the graphics market has become. In particular, the strategic partnership with both Intel and AMD appears one of the key issues setting ATI apart from most of their competitors. Keep in mind, though, that strategic partnerships are not always based on technical merit alone and keep in mind the cornerstone endorsement of 3GIO by ATI one year ago. All in all, behind the scenes of a political mastermind drama, the story could read somewhat different than what we see on the surface.

Time for the appetizer: RADEON 9000 and 9000 Pro

Enabling the right features at the right moment, that is fulfilling the demand as it arises is the essence of grabbing the window of opportunity. By the end of the year, we'll see more than 100 games using DX 8.1 features and, therefore, a dramatic increase in the demand for DX 8.1 compliant graphics cards. At the same time, it appears as if the faltering broadband rollout is finally getting a second wind meaning that the basis for high speed internet access is finally moving into remote areas that still encompass some 70-80 % of the entire US population.

RADEON 9000 Pro using the conventional TSOP DDR packaging for lower cost

DX8.1 and broadband internet access are two key features standing godfather for the latest generation of ATI card, that is the RADEON 9000 and 9000 pro. In brief, the RADEON 9000 and 9000 Pro are budget implementations of the 8500 Series with the full feature set as dual head / Hydravision, DX 8.1, and full-stream video deblocking (streaming video applications have a tendency for pixelation into block patterns which is at least mitigated with the new hardware deblocking features. There have been enough pictures posted everywhere already, so we don't care too much). On the hardware level, the main difference between the R250 (RADEON 9000) and the older R200 (R8500) are the single vertex shader unit compared to the dual vertex shaders of the R200 and the reduction to one texture unit per pixel pipeline which, however, can run 6 loops per pass compared to three of the R200 core.

Any graphics card with 64 MB onboard DDR memory and running at 250/400 MHz for core/memory (RADEON 9000) and 275 / 550 MHz (9000 Pro), SMARTSHADER, HYDRAVISION, SMOOTHVISION, TRUEFORM and FULLSTREAM would have been in the $200 range only a few months ago. The current msrp is US$ 109 and US$ 119, respectively and positions the two versions of the 9000 directly against the GeForce4 MX competition from nVidia. As a side effect, most other competitors will have to fight an uphill death battle, which most likely eliminates the new S3 Savage, as well as the SIS Xabre even before any production cards hit the shelves. Aside from the just mentioned features, the RADEON 9000 has the proverbial ATI image quality based on a dual 370 MHz RAMDAC with high-level out put filtering going for it.

Going back to Smoke and Mirrors, the 9000 series was certainly not what Paul Ayscough was talking about earlier, these two cards were only the warm-up for one of the most mind-blowing demonstrations in the history of graphics cards including dynamic fur growth and we can see why this would be exciting news .....

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