25 Years Of Graphics History: A Farewell To ATI, In Pictures

[wh3resmycar]

im sorry but did i miss the 9500pro?

 

[scrumworks]

It's nice that you remember to mention "driver issues" all the time. Of course nvidia never had/has any driver issues. This is more like f-you to ATI in Tom's style.

 

[scrumworks]

No Radeon 9800Pro which was the most popular (ever?) and fastest model at the time clearly wiping nvidia's FX-joke lineup. I don't bother browsing the rest images because comments are mainly negative.

 

[gamebrigada]

My ATI boards...
x1350
x1950 XTX
x1950 PRO
2600XT
2900XT
4850
4870
4770
5850
6870.

Hmm....
Nvidia boards...
6800.
8800.
Hated both for mediocre driver support, and the lack of happy colors =D

 

[V3ctor]

My GPU's:
nVidia GeForce TNT2 M64 - Greatest crap ever, very unstable, bad drivers
nVidia GeForce MX440 - it burned up playing Battlefield 1942
ATi 9600PRO 128MB - Loved it, lasted 4 years
nVidia GeForce 7800GTX - Lasted 2 years, lots of problems, artefacts
ATi HD2900XT - Liked it, but I was disappointed, it was too loud and hot
ATi HD4870 - Loved the performance/price of it, only if it had 1Gb
nVidia GTS250 - Bought it for a weaker pc, bad cooler, very noisy
ATi HD5870 - Love this one, great price/performance, low temperatures, low power consumption (best ATi/AMD card I ever owned)

Looking forward for HD7000 series...

 

[jj463rd]

Oddly I still have a VGA Wonder card (I somehow didn't throw it out).

 

[vasilecelmare]

I've started to cry while browsing this article... Thank You ATI for the good work for all these years!

AMD - keep bringing it!

"the RED videocard's" fan 4ever

 

[nitzero]

My ATI cards:

Sapphire Radeon 9550 128MB - Was a solid performer and great little card for it's price but a lot of drivers issues back then. Ultima Online which was a quite old game would suddenly crash over and over, games like Unreal Tournament also had issues, ran Half Life 2 flawlessly which was great at the time. Drivers got better but was quite late.

Sapphire Radeon 1650 Pro 512MB DDR3 - This one sucked really bad, replaced by a 6600GT which was cheaper and offered a lot more, still had drivers issues! On City of Heroes it would suddently go in slow motion, OpenGL support was terrible. Even a Geforce FX 5500 could run OpenGL games fine. The card suddently stopped working on a second PC.

MSI Radeon 2900XT 1GB - This one died on me after a couple of months, it was very hot but pretty fast, didn't last long enough but I didn't have problems with this card other than it's failure.

XFX Radeon 4770 512MB - Loved this one, great performer! Replaced a 9600GT and performed much better and consumed very little power, drivers had a few issues with games and I got disappointed trying to get this card to run on linux. The native HDMI+Audio support was great.

I had less driver issues with nVidia for sure but the vgas failure rate seems to be pretty equal, I lost 2 cards, a 6600GT and 8600GTS compared to the 2900XT and the 1650 Pro... 3 of these 4 cards were from MSI, I'll never buy a MSI product again.

ATI was a great brand, I was so proud of my Radeon 9550 that transformed to a 9600 later, could run Need for Speed Underground, Max Payne 2 and Half Life 2 like nothing else, that was probably their best moment.

I wounder how ATI would be today if AMD didn't buy them.

 

[blibba]

This is the toms hardware article of the day? Seriously?

 

[mitch074]

As the article's editor said: the R300 generation was a BIG comeback for Ati:
- the 9500 Pro could often be unlocked and O/C to become a 9700 Pro
- it was DirectX 9 - compatible even before DX9 came out.

The 9600 didn't have much better performance than the 9500: it was "just" a die shrink (not a crippled higher range chip anymore, using a smaller process) running at higher clock speeds (due to the smaller process).

At the time, the Geforce 9500 competed against Nvidia's Geforce 4200 (same performance, but fixed functions only); The FX series had come out, led by the infamous "dustbuster". Only when Nvidia got the 6600GT out did Ati lose the performance for money contest.

The 9xxx cards (all R300 chips, except the 9200) were AGP cards; the chip was redesigned to run on PCI Express for the R4xx (X1xxx) generation, but said redesign was very awkward - and didn't stand out much against the Geforce 6/7 families.

...and let's not forget the HD 4850, which was a THG recommendation for 2 years and a half, longer than its bigger sibling the 4870! I wonder why it wasn't mentioned.

 

[yellowblue]

Rage 2 -> GForce 2 MX -> X1600Pro -> HD4850 -> ?
I still use Rage 2 on my linux box.

 

[sethroque]

I have a 1600 XT and it's still up and running 😛

 

[rolli59]

I will always remember my first PC with the wonderful EGA WONDER! What a difference playing Leisure suit Larry with 16 colors (out of 64)from monochrome.

 

[Guest]

I use ATI cards in PC builds 2/1 against Nvidia these days, all has changed since the 8800gt days when that was the best buy for average gamer!

 

[AlienIsGOD]

I think the 4850 should have been on the list. The card redifined the ~200 dollar market, and in Crossfire are still a valid option today

 

[Guest]

Geez, would it really be THAT difficult to go back & edit this power-point- piece, with the impartation a few slides(or pictures, whatever) chronicling the absolute pre-4xx0 PEAK, viz. the R300? And I don't mean in passing, with the admissible flagship 9700 a...bizarre admission. Honestly.

Seems like a gaff, I guess. My critique aside, I very much enjoyed the sentimentality through time. Applause to the effort.

 

[woshitudou]

My old ATI 9800 pro and ATI x1950xt were great cards and I'm happy to have my AMD Radeon 5970. AMD is a great brand and a big company and it's nice to see the name used on the cards.

 

[dannymac63]

What's with the paltry description of the latest ATI products that happened to be incredible successes?

The writer/editor must have never used nVidia products to mention that many driver errors on the ATI side without an nVidia driver mention.

The HD5870 gets literally one sentence, and it has to be one of the worst written caption and titles I've seen. Pretty sure that card took the single GPU performance crown back from Nvidia for almost a year, and at the same time cutting power consumption by half over it's closest competition.

 

[KT_WASP]

I switched over to ATI later in the game.

My ATI history:

Sapphire ATI X1950 Pro 256MB
Visiontek ATI HD 4850 512MB
Gigabyte AMD HD 6950 2GB

Not a problem with any of them, all ran/run great. Still have them all and I love em.

I, too, am scratching my head over the HD 4850 not being mentioned in this walk down memory lane. It was a ground breaking performance champion for a good price. It seams like it was on Toms own recommended list longer then any other card in my memory too.. Just surprised it didnt get a nod.

 

[timmu_india]

Nice article. Hope AMD will do best and I wish them good luck.

 

[StigHelmer]

I distinctively remember the first Radeon being the 32 and 64 models (R100), not the 7500 (R150).

 

[goonigoogoo]

Alas the end of an era, but IMO when they sold out to AMD that was it for me. I never bought an ATI product since they went south of the border. Good quality product, great drivers, great competition against Nvidia for a long time. Kudos to the old era ATI.

Video cards, fighter jets ... what next? Maple syrup?

P.S. you should have put the 9800pro in the article, hands down their best product ever to be released.

 

[Reynod]

I felt the entire article was quite negative except towards the end - which detracted from the entire point of the article.

You generally celebrate the end of something Igor ... not take a massive swipe at it.

That's considered poor form.

Having owned 50 or more graphics cards (including the old S3 Trio's and Tseng Labs, Matrox, etc) I was always generally impressed with the ATI cards, both in terms of price and performance.

The cards that impressed me most from ATI for price were always their mid range cards, which always offered better performance than NVidia for the price: the 9600XT, the 1800XT, the 3850, the 4670, the 5850 (high end performance and mid end price) and such.

The only midrange card NVidia ever produced that impressed me for the price was the 9600GT ...

Whilst ATI early on had more driver issues than NVidia, that is no longer the case.

While you mentioned ATI cards running quite hot you might want to remember some of the NVidia cards that baked at over 100 degrees C ... the 8800 series whilst fast, also buned out frequently ... I have dead 7900 (3) and 8800 (GTS) cards here.

We probably should not discuss the G92 and GF100 Underfill problems either - at least ATI never knowingly sold defective graphics chips to the world ... but NVidia did ... they sold millions of them in laptops.

They had to writeoff millions of dollars ... whilst suckering in all of the big OEM's.

 

[nevertell]

Had the 9800 Pro, was used in a linux box. Sucked. Why ? DRIVERS!

Maybe they're all right on Windows/Mac, but the linux one's are down right shit.

 

[nforce4max]

You left out the "ATI Small Wonder" for ISA. You left out the X1900XT/X and the X1950pro. The X1950pro was a significant change for ati. No longer was there a need for a master card in crossfire and became something more like sli any card of the same model will be just fine. The x1900xt was on the scene before the x1950xt after the failure that the x1800 series was. Also the 3870 ffs that was a very popular card for the time and even now they are sure to sell and even as a Nvidia user it is a personal favorite. 9700 pro and the 9800 pro were by far much more popular than the more expensive and rare 9800 xt and the 9800 pro AIW was by far one of their best multimedia cards that they have ever produced.