Praetor

Section 07 - A Look at ATi
ATi one of the largest (in terms of marketshare) players in the videocard market with their direct competition being nVidia. Their claims to fame are:

• Image Quality. Typically speaking, ATi cards are generally known to have superior image quality when compared to their nVidia counterparts
• AA/AF Performance. Related to their image quality, not only do ATi cards generally have better image quality, enabling performance hitting features like AA and AF generally results in a smaller performance hit on ATi hardware than on nVidia hardware (meaning that more often than not, ATi users can, at the same framerate as nVidia hardware, have AA/AF turned one level higher than their competition)
• Texture Compression: 3Dc if one of ATi's general claim to fame is image quality, the other is memory efficiency: and 3Dc is a testiment to that: allowing for 4:1 compression of texture, this means that game developers can cram 4x as much data into the texture memory as per usual. ATi's competition, nVidia, uses a different technique that only allows for (currently) 2:1 compression meaning that ATi users enjoy a [potential] 2:1 advantage in terms of texture quality.
• Unlocking and overclocking. Especially with older cards like the 9500Pro, it was found that pixel processing pipelines could be activated with a simple hack (thus allowing people to buy the cheaper 9500Pro and get the performance of the 9700Pro). This trend is common with other ATi cards as well. Furthermore, ATi cards (until recently with their X1000 series cards) run cooler which then allows for overclocking.
• Ringbus. Again with memory efficiency, ATi's new 512bit RingBus allows for extremely efficient memory access and even allows for the controller itself to be programmed meaning it can adapt to the changing memory access requirements.

On the flip side however, there are some not-so-great things generally known about ATi:

• Less than perfect drivers. Until maybe a year or two ago, ATi drivers were quite known to be unstable and present a wide variety off "undesired effects" depending on various games and applications: Starting with Catalyst 4.x, things began to shape up however and for the most part, ATi drivers are quite stable. The problem now however is that dealing with ATi's drivers often means [a] [potentially] dealing with a Catalyst Control Center (which, requiring .NET, has it's own issues to begin with, although users can still opt for the Classic setup) and [b] getting access to ATi's drivers can be a hassle: hotlinking to ATi's website isnt nearly as friendly an experience as, say, nVidia's driver management
• UDA. ATi's unified driver architecture, an attempt to follow nVidia's footsteps in making a one-file-to-download-for-all-drivers is generally 'bloated'. While this isnt nearly as much of an issue as the .NET drivers or even worse, unstable drivers, it does irk quite a number of people
• Paper launches. By far one of the most annoying things about ATi are therir paper launches: they announce that a zillion different products are available but none actually hit the market for months to come and others are pulled after a very short lifespan (i.e., X700XT)
• Nomenclature. It seems with each new generation ATi cards add half a dozen more suffixes to their cards (although nVidia is following suit) ... much to the dismay of casual consumers everywhere.

Now for a quick breakdown of the last three or so generations of ATi cards

• DirectX7 Class Radeons. These were the cards prior to the introduction of shaders and DirectX; their competition was the GeForce2
  • R100 - Radeon [SDR, DDR, DDR-AIW, KE ,VE]
  • R100 - Radeon 7000
  • R100 - Radeon 7200
  • R200 - Radeon 7500 [Plain, AIW, LE]
• DirectX8 Class Radeons. These cards featured were generally inferior to thei nVidia counterparts the GeForce3/4Ti cards.
  • R200 - Radeon 8500 [Plain, AIW, LE]
  • R250 - Radeon 9100 [Plain, IGP, ProIGP]
  • R280 - Radeon 9200 [Plain, SE, AIW, Pro]
  • R280 - Radeon 9250
• DirectX9 Class Radeons - 9000 Series. nVidia proved to be a superior make for DirectX8 class cards however when the Radeon9700 hit the market, things rapidly switched leaving ATi as the dominant player for a very long time (i.e., pretty much until now). nVidia's response was the much failed GeForceFX lineup.
  • R300 - Radeon 9500 [I, L, Pro]
  • R350/R360 - Radeon 9550 [Plain, XT]
  • R350/R360 - Radeon 9600 [Plain, AIW, Pro, SE, Pro-AIW]
  • R360 - Radeon 9600 [XT, AIW-XT]
  • R300 - Radeon 9700 [Plain, AIW, Pro, Pro-AIW]
  • R350 - Radeon 9800 [Plain, SE, XL]
  • R350/R360 - Radeon 9800 [Pro, Pro-AIW]
  • R360 - Radeon 9800 XT
• DirectX9 Class Radeons - X-Series. This series, lead by the X800/X850 is the direct competitor to the neck-in-neck race with nVidia's GeForce6 lineup
  • R370 - Radeon X300 [Plainl, SE, SE Hypermemory]
  • R380 - Radeon X600 [AIW, Pro, XT]
  • R410 - Radeon X700 [LE, Pro, XT]
  • R410 - Radeon X740 XL
  • R420 - Radeon X800 [SE, Pro, XT, XT PE, XT-AIW]
  • R423/R480 - Radeon X800 [GT, GTO, GTO²]
  • R423 - Radeon X800 XT
  • R430 - Radeon X800 [Plain, XL]
  • R430Pro - Radeon X800 STD
  • R481 - Radeon X850 [Pro, XT, XT PE]
• DirectX9.0c Class Radeons - X1000-Series. This is the current incarnation of the Radeon lineup, which is due to compete with the current GeForce7 lineup from nVidia
  • R515 - Radeon X1300 [Plain, Hypermemory, Pro]
  • R530 - Radeon X1600 [Pro, XT, XL]
  • R520 - Radeon X1800 [XL, XT]
  • R580 - Radeon X1900 [Plain, XT, XTX]

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