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The year was 1993 when Jen-Hsun Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem formed a little company called Nvidia. All three men brought prior experience in the industry to their new venture, including building processors for AMD (Huang). Nvidia started off as a fabless company, meaning it didn't have its own manufacturing plant to kick out wafers and integrated circuits.
That would soon change, setting the stage for a fierce rivarly with ATI that would rage on for years, even as other graphics makers fell by the wayside and/or out of prominence. Today the discrete graphics market is almost totally owned by AMD (which now owns ATI) and Nvidia.
Released in 1994, the Mach64 was ATI's first graphics card to boast full-motion video acceleration. Along with S3's Trio, these cards put the squeeze on companies like Oak Technologies and Cirrus Logic, both of which were beginning to lose market share to the competition with their fancy accelerators capable of offloading video tasks.
Image Credit: hattix.co.uk
The Mach64 shipped with up to 8MB of video memory on a 64-bit bus. ATI's Mach64 architecture also flexed its muscle in the professional graphics market, such as the Graphics Pro Turbo. Not for the faint of wallet, a Graphics Pro Turbo equipped with 2MB of VRAM listed for $600, while a 4MB model sold for $900. A veritable bargain compared to what professional graphics card sell for today.
In 1995, ATI did something no other graphics vendor had ever done. The company released a videocard for the Mac platform, becoming the first company in the world to cater to both the PC (as in, Windows-based) and Mac. It was called the XCLAIM GA, an OEM part for Apple's PowerPC products.
"ATI is bringing affordable performance to the Power Macintosh market with a graphics accelerator board specifically deigned for Macintosh design and publishing professionals," AIT announced at the time. "Our PCI-based accelerators are priced at a third of what users would pay for traditional NuBus graphics cards."
The XCLAIM GA used ATI's Mach64 graphics controller and supported resolutions up to 1600x122 with a 75Hz refresh rate. It was available in both 2MB and 4MB versions with MSRPs of $450 and $650, respectively.
Equally important, supplying graphics cards to Apple played a role in ATI's return to profitability in 1995. Later in the year, ATI, United Microelectronics, and a few other partners entered into an agreement to build a semiconductor plant in Taiwan, giving ATI the foundry capacity it needed to remain a major player in the graphics market.
By the time 1996 rolled around, the graphics market was no longer new, but it still hadn't seen its first 3D accelerator. That changed when ATI launched its 3D Rage chip, which was also called the Mach64 GT because it mashed 3D technology with the Mach64's 2D capabilities. The 3D Rage powered most of ATI's graphics solutions and would later provide a compelling alternative to 3dfx's mighty Voodoo chipset. The advance into 3D territory helped ATI sell over a million chips in 1996.
A graphics card with a built-in TV tuner? Brilliant! That was the idea behind ATI's now infamous All-in-Wonder line, which was first launched on November 11, 1996. The original All-in-Wonder was built around the 3D Rage II+ engine and slid into any available standard PCI port (it would be another year before AGP would emerge).
Combining TV functionality with computer graphics proved popular and there would be several AIW cards to follow. In almost every case, these cards would run a little slower than the 3D cards they were built around, but it was a trade-off HTPC enthusiasts were willing to make. The AIW line lived on for over a decade until ATI unofficially retired the series with the All-in-Wonder HD in 2008, the last AIW card to date.
By the late 1990s, it was no longer a question of whether or not there existed a market for 3D graphics hardware, but how best to cater to it. There were two problems with the PCI bus. First, it was simply too slow. But compounding the problem, any device plugged into a PCI port had to share bandwidth with other devices.
In 1997, the Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) was born. Built specifically for graphics cards, the AGP port solved both problems, but early graphics cards failed to take full advantage of the new spec and were nothing more than bridged solutions. With the release of the 3D Rage Pro, ATI goes down in history as the first company to serve up full support for AGP (AGP 2X).
Someone over at ATI got the memo that you have to spend money to make money, and so in 1998, ATI spent $3 million scooping up nearly all of the graphics design assets from Tseng Labs, a struggling graphics company. Among other things, the deal included Tseng's facilities, proprietary designs, and team of 40 engineers. Later that same year, ATI would acquire Chromatic Research, Inc. for $67 million. At the time, Chromatic was involved with producing System-on-a-Chip (SoC) technology for set-top boxes and other CE devices.
The acquisitions helped ATI double its sales from the previous year to CAD$1.15 billion. Moreover, ATI was now the No. 1 graphics supplier in the galaxy.
ATI would make some other acquisitions in the years to follow, including the buyout of FireGL Graphics, making official the company's foray into professional graphics. But it's biggest acquisition might have been for ArtX, which made Flipper Graphic Processing Chips, such as the one used in Nintendo GameCubes. This acquisition would play a role in ATI landing its graphics chip in Microsoft's Xbox 360 consoles.
Comments are closed on this article
onlyhtml
April 03, 2011 at 2:13am
Goodbye, ATI. Don't screw your new line of graphic cards up, whenever you may make them.
wirehedd
October 01, 2010 at 6:29pm
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several thousand "discrete graphics aware" respondents spread out across the U.S., U.K., Germany, China, Japan, Brazil, and Russia. According to John Volkmann, AMD's VP of global corporate marketing, "the Radeon brand and the ATI brand are equally strong with respect to conveying our graphics processor offering."
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This statement is pure utter horseshit. They wanted to just claim the advances and reputational achievements for themselves and seeing as the ATI brand name ECLIPSED AMDs status as a graphics producer they will eliminate that problem.
Pricks.
Never buying another AMD product again foir JUST this reason as I know people who were engineers at ATI in Newmarket Ontario who bustedf their asses for that company and to make it what it became.
AMD can blow me.
Skrýmir
October 02, 2010 at 8:54pm
Have fun spending 999 dollars on a Hexa-core CPU, dude. You're over analyzing the situation, even more so than AMD. ATI has had a huge role in AMD's success as of late, but i don't think there was some huge agenda behind the name change.
huhhuh
September 29, 2010 at 7:58am
The tv input part crapped out after one year of ownership/
I paid 350 for it in 2004.
Another fact I hated was loose proprietary connector on the back of it.
That was my last ATI video card.On a side note, I can't believe that major technical website has the most major spam problems with most major spam protection that pisses off it's regular users.
Skrýmir
October 02, 2010 at 8:56pm
Of course they're going to be more likely to get spammed than a less popular website.
CentiZen
September 28, 2010 at 7:08pm
No dipshit, they don't think that at all. And infact, it has nothing to do with AMD's products, even though they are fine chips that intel fanboys feel threatened by (hence your derogatory post). Now the concepts of business might be a little much for you little fanboy, but supporting and maintaining a brand name gets more difficult and expensive as it gains in size, and it makes perfect fiscal sense for AMD to consolidate the two into a single entity.
You still there? Or have you gone back to watching RayWilliamJohnson and listening to the black eyed peas?
aziobron
September 28, 2010 at 10:10pm
you dont have to be an asshole with your explaination. perhaps he didnt think of that aspect when trying to figure it out. he made a simple comment and you fired back with a rude paragraph. douche
sniggler
September 28, 2010 at 3:46pm
I was sad when they were bought out by AMD, and now I'm even sadder. This marks the death of a great brand, regardless of how they may or may not have been backed by AMD for the past couple of years.
Having been an ATI fan for ages, I was disappointed to find myself swapping my 5850 recently for 2 GTX 460's in SLI. I originally intended to run 2 x 5850's in Crossfire, but buggy drivers (see cursor glitch in SC2) and poor minimum framerates, combined with AMD's second-rate customer service and being unable to find another reference 5850 anywhere save for a used one... The list goes on and on.. Oh and did I mention the ridiculous prices of the 5850 until they recently started to trickle down? Sure it was cheap when it launched, and that's how it should have stayed - at the $250 price point, not the painful $350 I paid for mine at the time.
Alas, my GTX 460 1GB models are wiping the floor with the ref / non-ref 5850 xfire combo I had tested for a short time before returning the non-ref card (it was just fugly; way too long for my case and completely dashed my plans of using a liquid cooled solution down the road). SLI scales better, hell even my first GTX 460 by itself was outperforming my 5850 in the games I played thanks to improved drivers and more game companies jumping on the Green bandwagon to optimize their code for NV gpu's.
On a side note, ATI chips were being used in some gamecube models before the Wii was ever released, so to say that the Wii was the first Nintendo product to incorporate an ATI gpu isn't entirely accurate.
Very sad to see yet another great brand die out in the PC industry. 3DFX, BFG, ATI, who's next? Yes, I know you could argue that ATI lives on thru the AMD brand, but given my experience these past few months, not so.
noobstix
September 28, 2010 at 9:45am
My very first Radeon GPU was the 9200SE (128 MB). At the time I had it (which was in the late 90s), it was able to handle some games better than my S3 ViRGE card (which only had 64 MB). It wasn't until I realized that it was more than just the amount of memory on a video card that factored into gaming performance was when I convinced my dad to shell out a little more on a video card than normal. I got myself a Radeon X1650 Pro which really satisified me for a few years since some games I was able to run on high detail while other games I could run on medium detail. In these past 5 years, I've had to move on from that X1650 Pro in order to get something with more juice to play the more recent games. That's when my brother gave me his Radeon HD3650 which was definitely much faster (I think about double the speed). Now I'm rolling with my Radeon HD5770 and will be proud that I have one of the last generations of video cards with the ATI name on it. I think this video card will last me a few more years before I pass it down to my dad or oldest brother to make way for whatever AMD series comes up (probably the 7000 or 8000 series or whatever they'll call it).
Radeon 9200SE (ATI) --> Radeon X1650 Pro (ATI) --> Radeon HD3650 (Diamond) --> Radeon HD5770 (Diamond)
RAF
September 28, 2010 at 3:11am
This is one of the most enjoyable articles that I have read on a long time.
Thanks Paul, and keep on the good work.
Chriscic
September 27, 2010 at 11:07pm
" and viewing the entry-level and mid-range markets as almost an afterthought all led to 3dfx's eventual demise."
No, actually it was the opposite. 3DFX management always said the big money was on the motherboard, and buying mb manufacturer STB was what sunk them. Voodoo 4/5 was also greatly delayed by everyone working on the Banshee mid-range part. If they'd stuck to designing high-end they would have survived at least a few years longer than they did.
This recollected quite clearly by a stockholder who suffered big losses.
andrewc513
September 27, 2010 at 6:48pm
First DX7 card in 2007? Crap, PS3/360 was waaaay ahead of their time. :P
Simple typo, awesome article!
Pylon
September 27, 2010 at 6:21pm
Minor mistake:
On p. 3, you mention "The very first Radeon card debuted in 2007 and was a DirectX 7 part." The year is obviously off.
dmonkyking
September 27, 2010 at 6:16pm
Well it was a good run and I'll miss the ATI name. They put out some good products (just not so good drivers). I think I still have my old All-In-Wonder and Rage II cards in a box somewhere too, think I'll keep them for sentimental reasons.
JohnP
September 27, 2010 at 10:35pm
"So I will keep it always!" syndrome. That leads to a closet full of old computer crap that is worthless. Folks are going to die and their kin are going to say "what the hell is this thing?" and (hopefully) recycle it. Why not save them the aggravation and recycle it yourself.
I have a "one year rule". Have I touched it in a year? If not, do I really need to keep it?
Havok
September 27, 2010 at 6:23pm
D.I.P.R.I.P now! Blasted spammers, we don't need their kind here...
