Markham (ON) - Being accused of using driver cheats to increase the performance of its newest graphics chips, while compromising image quality, ATI has decided to discuss this issue in an open live chat today. In ATI's opinion, trilinear filtering algorithms are an "intelligent" way to increase performance without affecting image quality.

In a brief statement, ATI said that it would "clear this up" by holding the live web chat on May 19 at 3pm EST, 9pm CET. Andy Pomianowski, staff engineer, and architect of ATI's image analysis and compression algorithms, as well as Raja Koduri, engineering manager, graphics architecture and performance tools, one of ATI's experts on performance and image quality will be available to answer questions at www.ati.com/online/chat .

In earlier statements, ATI said that the objective of trilinear filtering was to make transitions between mipmap levels as near to invisible as possible. "As long as this is achieved, there is no "right" or "wrong" way to implement the filtering," the company said.