Article

ATI Video Products & Technologies

We met with Andrew Thompson, Director of Advanced Technology Marketing for ATI Technologies for an in-depth explanation of ATI's current line of RADEON video cards and insight into technologies that drive the games of today and those of tomorrow.

ATI RADEON 9800 Pro

ATI's "King of The Hill" video card is highly prized in the enthusiast gaming community and has made good inroads into NVIDIA's massive installed base of GeForce video cards. ATI claims it can easily handle anything tossed at it, a claim we here at GeekSpeak hope to test for ourselves. While being based on the same core architecture as the RADEON 9700 Pro video card introduced in late 2002, even utilizing the same 256-bit DDR-1 memory, The RADEON 9800 Pro contains advancements that allow the card to be clocked at a higher 680MHz frequency rather than 533MHz. This allows the RADEON to outperform the previous model in the same games while raising the overall effective data bandwidth inside the card to 21.8 gigabytes per second, giving it more headroom for the next generation of games.

Another powerful new feature that ATI added is an F-buffer which, in simple terms, is a technique that saves rendering time and reduces bandwidth requirements by storing complex effects -- especially those containing transparencies -- in a special memory buffer so that pixels can have foreground and background colors stored separately. Unfortunately, this is the simplest explanation we can provide without making this technology even more confusing. F-buffer, short for Fragmanet-Stream FIFO buffer, is an implementation proposed by William Mark and Kekoa Proudfoot at Stanford University.

By utilizing a 256-bit memory interface, a feature that ATI flaunts in the face of NVIDIA's 128-bit support, along with DDR memory, eight pixel pipelines, programmable shader engines, and full speed, full floating point support for Microsoft DirectX 9.0, ATI claims that by using the ATI RADEON 9800 Pro, performance does not need to be sacrificed for image quality. RADEON 9800 boards should be available in mid-April, 2003.

ATI RADEON 9600 Pro

ATI's high-volume, mainstream product, while also being squarely targeted at the enthusiast gaming segment, offers many of the features used with in RADEON 9800 PRO but with reduced power and performance at a more affordable price.

The RADEON 9600 video card doesn't skimp on the features, mirroring those of the RADEON 9800 PRO. It is also the first ATI product to be developed using a more advanced 130 nanometer production process compared to the 180 nanometer process used in its other video card products, including even the 9800 Pro. Expect to see RADEON 9600 Pro cards in April, 2003.

ATI RADEON 9200 Pro

ATI's low-end value family of video cards seems to be targeted more at digital video users rather than gamers. With capabilities like streaming video de-blocking and other video imagery features being touted in lieu of the advanced gaming features of the middle and top tier RADEON cards, the RADEON 9200 is definitely an entry-level card that is priced accordingly for the price-conscious consumer. Further evidence of this lays in the fact that the 9200 Pro does not support DirectX 9.0 but rather DirectX 8.1 and the older gaming special effects technologies that go with it. Of course, not every gamer needs access to the latest gaming technologies, especially when playing games like The Sims and WarCraft III. The RADEON 9200 Pro should be available in April of 2003.

Microsoft DirectX 9.0

With microphone in-hand, we had the chance to speak further with Andrew Thompson, taking an opportunity to learn more about DirectX 9.0 (www.microsoft.com/directx) technology and how graphics chips have evolved to support floating point functions that were traditionally handled by processors of the past. Floating point, or "messy math," is processor-intensive math used heavily in video games and deals with decimals and exponents instead of integer based whole numbers. ATI explains DirectX 9 technology and why it and floating point support in modern graphic processors are important for games. "So probably the one biggest feature that is in DirectX 9...".

ATI's RenderMonkey Tools

Picture: ati_booth_320.jpg, ati_booth_1024.jpg Caption: ATI had a small theatre set up to teach uninitiated game developers the ways of its RenderMonkey software suite. Yes, RenderMonkey. To access the cool new features offered by DirectX 9 and the latest game hardware, game developers, the wizards who stare at computers for hours pounding out the software code that eventually become the games you play, need good developer tools. These tools, like ATI's RenderMonkey, are becoming more and more important to game development as they help developers take advantage of the newest features built into DirectX 9.0 and the RADEON line of graphics cards. ATI's RenderMonkey software suite is best explained by ATI, "The developers are looking for the install base of hardware...".

What is a shader?

After describing ATI's RenderMonkey tools, ATI left us with one major question: what is a shader? Andrew explains that a shader is new lingo for an old technology in the video world. Basically, it's a small part of a program that allows cutting edge visual effects from a game to be written directly to the graphics hardware which is in turn displayed on the monitor during the game. Shaders used to be tiny, highly optimized, and very specialized algorithms, but with today's powerful hardware, general purpose shaders are now possible. As ATI explains it, "a shader is just a tiny little program..."

ATI is certainly making its RADEON imprint known to the world, and we can't wait to hear more, and even perhaps test and review actual hardware to provide a more objective opinion.