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The bigger they are the harder they fall, and 3dfx was at one time big. Really big. They were also heralded as a market leader and pioneer in gaming grade graphics, and quite frankly, we get a little misty just thinking about it. 3dfx truly revolutionized 3D graphics technology, and had they been managed better, might have been bigger than both ATI or Nvidia today. But mismanagement of funds, lengthy production schedules, and viewing the entry-level and mid-range markets as almost an afterthought all led to 3dfx's eventual demise.
Had 3dfx not gone bankrupt, it's hard telling what might have happened in the 3D graphics market. But when Nvidia acquired 3dfx's intellectual property in 2000, one of ATI's biggest competitors was no more. By that same token, ATI's main rival, Nvidia, received an influx of talented employees and valuable resources.
Image Credit: pcgameshardware.com
Congratulations, it's a videocard! It's hard to believe, but the Radeon name has been around for a decade. The very first Radeon card debuted in 2000 and was a DirectX 7 part. It also supported OpenGL 1.3. The Radeon brand signaled ATI's ascent back into the high-end graphics market and gave the company a competitive product line to go up against Nvidia, which by 2000 had become the fastest growing graphics company in the world.
Along with a fresh new name came a fresh new way of doing business. After getting pummeled by Nvidia, whose market share was almost twice that of ATI's, ATI brought in some new faces for upper management and began licensing its technology to Taiwan board suppliers rather than make all its own add-in boards. This give ATI a bigger budget to work with, and also the ability to create two chip-design teams, the upshot being ATI could tighten its release schedule for new products.
Going forward, once AMD retires the ATI name completely, the Radeon brand will continue to be used to designate new graphics cards.
A case can be made that nearly all of ATI's products were significant in some way, but some rank higher up on the charts than others. The 9700 Pro, for example, was not only ATI's first DirectX 9 part, it was the first DX9 card in the world. So what's the big deal? Microsoft's DX9 API was one of the biggest things to happen to graphics in roughly a decade.
Image Credit: ibxtlabs.com
The 9700 Pro was also the first major product to come from ATI's newly acquired ArtX design group. A beast of a GPU, the 9700 Pro ran circles around every other graphics solution on the planet and leapfrogged ATI to the front of the performance pack ahead of Nvidia.
Fun Fact: The 9700 Pro was the first videocard to utilize a flip-chip package, whereby the die is flipped over and squished directly the cooler's heatsink.
Do you own an Xbox 360 console? If you do, you're also the owner of ATI graphics hardware. Microsoft took an interest in ATI's acquisition of ArtX, the same company behind Nintendo's GameCube graphics, and inked an agreement with ATI to produce GPUs for the Xbox 360 console. ATI calls the part "Xenos," a 500MHz chip with 337 million transistors, 48 shader pipelines, and 16 texture filtering units.
Around the same time, Nintendo also tapped ATI to produces the graphics chip for its upcoming console(s). The first of these is the currently shipping Wii, which uses ATI's "Hollywood" GPU. In 2009, AMD would ship its 50 millionth Hollywood chip, making it the most successful AMD technology-based game console chip to date in terms of unit sales.
The NASDAQ 100 comprises the 100 largest non-financial stocks on the NASDAQ Stock Market, and at the tail end of 2003, ATI made the list.
"This achievement is a testament to the hard work of the people at ATI who have build a world-leading visual processor company. Through our teams' efforts, our visual processors have become the products of choice for every platform, from the PC to the digital consumer markets of color cell phones, DTV, and game consoles," Ky Ho, Chairman and CEO of ATI, said in a statement at the time.
Indeed, ATI's multi-pronged approach was paying off. Having secured contracts with both Microsoft and Nintendo, ATI goosed its revenues to almost $1.4 billion in 2003, and more importantly, returned to profitability on net income of $35.2 million. And to think, ATI began with just $300,000 in capital!
After a remarkable 21 year run, ATI on July 24, 2006 was bought out by AMD for about $5.4 billion ($4.2 billion in cash and $1.2 billion in stock). At the time, analysts viewed the merger with a barrel full of skepticism, wondering how AMD would be able to juggle a graphics business when it was already struggling financially as a processor company. Ironically, ATI stock surged following news of the deal, while AMD stock dropped as investors questioned whether or not AMD overpaid for ATI.
Concerns aside, it was the end of a more than two-decade run for ATI as an independent company, but not the end of ATI as a brand, at least not yet.
Sobering Fact: The average marriage lasts 24 years. The ATI brand has been alive for 25 years.
While the world waited for Fermi -- and waited and waited and waited -- ATI, now owned by AMD, catered to gamers with its HD 5000 "Evergreen" series of GPUs. These awesome chips put AMD back on the performance throne and delivered DirextX gaming to enthusiasts of nearly any budget. Best of all, ATI accomplished a new level of performance and support without turning PCs into Mini Bake ovens.
Still today, the dual-GPU ATI HD 5970 ranks as the fastest single graphics card around. And now that ATI announced plans to retire the ATI name, the 5000 series might be the last cards to ever carry the familiar logo for a graphics company that started way back in 1985.
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...
