Preview of the New OpenGL Chips - Radeon 8800 vs. Quadro4 750XGL

ATI FireGL 8800 With The RADEON 8800

ATI, the Canadian graphics specialist, has left a spin-off of the established Radeon 8500 chip (code-named R200) to its German branch. The hardware of the OpenGL variant Radeon 8800 has been slightly modified, with the basic difference being that the drivers have been optimized for OpenGL. Aside from the conventional display drivers, it includes a special plug-in for 3D Studio Max.

The retail version of the Radeon 8800 chip runs at a clock speed of 250 MHz. The DDR RAM clock runs at 290 MHz, or '580 MHz' if you want to believe the marketing. ATI plans to offer optional ATI cards with modified clock speeds to the OEM market. Here the customer gets to put in his two cents. Apart from the typical specs for graphics chips, the marketing department of ATI definitely does itself proud in an attempt to appeal to the customer with futuristic-sounding words. To name a few:

• SMARTSHADER enables more complex and realistic lighting effects
• TRUFORM technology provides models with richer, life-like textures
• HYPER Z II technology conserves memory bandwidth for improved performance * CHARISMA ENGINE II supports Transformation, Clipping and Lighting (T&L) * PIXEL TAPESTRY II ensures fast fill rates in 32-bit true color resolution