ATI Strikes Back, Announces Next Generation Radeon Graphics Cards

In our Macworld NYC 2001 report we posted that when we tried to discuss ATI's future plans to strike back against NVIDIA's fabulous new GeForce3 graphics card that we reviewed here, the ATI representative asked us to wait until September. Well, yesterday ATI announced its new Radeon 7500 and 8500 graphics cards for PCs and its Fire GL 8800 for workstations, all for Wintels. However, the Radeon 8500 is also expected have Mac drivers. Here are the Wintel specs. The Wintel cards will be on the market in late September according to the ATI press release. Here is an excerpt on the $399 Radeon 8500:

"RADEON 8500: Designed with the most advanced graphics technology in the world, the RADEON 8500 delivers up to 33 percent higher performance than the nearest competitive graphics processor [NVIDIA GeForce3--Bill]. Major technological advancements include TRUFORM, an innovative rendering technology that helps to deliver the smoothest, most natural 3D images ever seen on existing and next-generation 3D games; and SMARTSHADER, an advanced technology that takes advantage of the new Microsoft DirectX 8.1 API (application programming interface) to enable more complex and realistic texture and lighting effects without sacrificing performance, including supporting Pixel Shaders Version 1.4."

Unfortunately, we could find nothing on ATI's web site regarding Mac versions at this time so we are relying solely on the ATI representative's comments at Macworld. Here is a prerelease comparison of the new Wintel versions of the ATI Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce cards.