ATi's New Radeon - Smart Technology Meets Brute Force

Introduction

ATi, the Canadian graphics chip and card maker with its headquarter in Toronto / Ontario, has been one of the big players in the PC graphics scene for a long time. It's still holding the biggest market share in the overall graphics chip and card market world wide and it has been expanding in several other new fields lately as well. However, despite all its high acclaims, ATi was never quite able to get hold of the performance freaks of this planet. Power hungry and fanatic 3D enthusiasts have so far only recognized two companies in the 3D hardware scene. In the past it was 3Dfx (today "3dfx") and today it is NVIDIA.

ATi's latest 3D chip "Radeon" is supposed to finally establish a strong foothold for ATI in this high-end 3D graphics arena as well, so that all 3D freaks might consider it closely with the products from NVIDIA and 3dfx. We know that ATi has claimed to have the fastest 3D chip many times in the past, but in tests the products always fell short of ATi's claims. ATi's pitch for the new Radeon is everything but modest once more (amongst others "fastest 32-bit gaming performance") and we will now find out if Radeon is able to deliver the performance that ATi is promising.