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

Page 6 - Seeking answers? Join the Tom's Hardware community: where nearly two million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
Status
Not open for further replies.
[citation][nom]yyk71200[/nom]Radeon 7500, should still be operationalGeforce 6800 Vanilla, probably still operational, but dropped it once on the floor and cooler fell offGeforce 7800 GT diedGeforce 8800 GT diedRadeon 4850 lasted for about two years, ran way too hot though until I replaced cooler. Great card nevertheless. Would have still used it, but died about a month agoGeforce 460 768 MB current, runs fine so far[/citation]

By years ago, do you mean 1998? Because that's about when I first remember them.

Didn't think so.
 
I still remember trying to buy a Radeon 9600 so I could play Halo:CE in full detail. Pre-built computer didn't have AGP though, so my dreams had to be put on hold until 2007...good memories.
 
My list of ATi Cards:

ATi Radeon VE
ATi Radeon 9800 Pro
ATi Radeon X1650 Pro
ATi Radeon X1950 Pro
Sapphire Radeon HD4670

I will continue to purchase products even without the ATi name, though I will miss it.
 
The 9700 pro was one of the most renowned card to come out of ATi, I'm really confused as to why you'd leave this card out. It was the first time ATi was able to trump Nvidia and as someone said above, start the GPU wars. How can anyone not remember/pay tribute to this card?
 
I loved my Mach32 on AGP. State of the art and ahead of the competition at the time. With a 33MHz 486 it could play the DOS games like Wolfenstein 3D, Heretic, Doom and Quake in 800x600 resolution. I had a lot of fun with that card and still respect it. I still think this card shook-up the industry more than any other int the early 90's. Still the 9800GT owned the gaming market when it came out. Took NVidia more than a year to come up with something that could match it. Gonna miss the ATI logo. You're not giving ATI enough credit here.
 
When I look back on the cards I've owned, It's mostly 50/50 but leans slightly towards nVidia. This mostly was because of budget, sometimes I just couldn't afford to get the ATi card that was faster at the time, so I settled for nVidia (I'm looking at you FX5700 Ultra). I have experienced drivers issues with both manufacturers cards, but nothing that I couldn't work out or kept me from enjoying the cards. I look back, and both manufacturers produce quality products, but both have had their fair share of driver and heat issues.

With that said, way to take a great article idea, and completely miss the point. This sounds like forced ATi nostalgia from someone who hasn't owned many of their cards personally nor fully respects the company's contributions to 3D gaming.

You left out the entire first generation Radeons, failed to mention the 9700Pro, and you only offer backhanded praise to the cards that truly dominated nVidia's offerings for that generation.

Learn to write a proper eulogy, ATi was one of the last big names in 3D gaming cards, and you have somehow managed to portray them as some also-ran second rate company. Shame on you.
 
Big Mistake to loose the name ATI.It was the one thing that brought AMD some upper credibility. Lets face it while AMD has made some decent processors the name simply sucks. As soon as I found out AMD acquired ATI I began to loose interest in it's wonderful History and the memories began to fade and the future feel hopeless.
 
[citation][nom]Belardo[/nom]I owned both the 9800Pro and GeForce 5900 at the same time. The 5900 was easily faster, cooler and SILENT (it was a MSI card and this started them gaining a reputation for quiet cards)... I loved both cards, but the 9800Pro was a bit faster and was my main gaming card for years, until it died The 5900 may still work in a PC resold as USED.[/citation]

I'm confused. You said the 5900 was faster... then said the 9800 Pro was?
 
As a Canadian, I feel sad that a superior product was purchased by a US company and sent into oblivion. This has happened so often to many superior technologies (Nortel?). I guess it really doesn't matter much but it is a comment on the need to keep on top by developing better technology instead of just superior marketing.
 
As a Canadian, I find it always sad when US companies buy our "better" technologies and then gradually neglect them until they fade away. This has happened so often. Thumbs down to ATi for selling out and AMD for going down a side path. They should have stuck to CPUs.
 
Sorry about the double comment. An error message kept telling me my first comment was not accepted. Sometimes technology programmers forget how to make things simple.
 
Seems like ATI's history written by nVidia! where is the Radeon 9700? 9800?? how on earth the so many failures of the 3,4,5,6 and 7-series of Geforce compared to their rivals from ATI are not mentioned? how come ATi's superiority in DX terms and shaders is not mentioned? how about ATi being the first to use the fastest memory chips on earth? if some young enthusiast who hasn't lived these days reads this article, it'd be a disaster for their technological knowledge overall. Not fair Tomshardware.
 
[citation][nom]dannymac63[/nom]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.[/citation]

The article read to me like it was written begrudgingly by and nVidia fan who was told to be "unbiased", but couldn't help himself. Very subtle words and phrases in the captions and blurbs.

I read it wondering what the "dig" would be in the next frame. It actually became quite funny. Apparently they have never gotten it quite right all these years!
 
yeah i must say i have 2 cross fired 5770 and im gonna be sad to change,I must admit my ideal Gaming Rig is A AMD core with awesome ATI Graphics
R.I.P ATI and welcomes the Rebirth of AMD to dominated the Ultimate gamers Rig again
 
That 9000 Pro was the cat;s meow for the price. A real deal of sorts.



Just pretty disappointed you skipped over the 9800 Pro 128mb. It was the epic of all epic (especially for the price), right before al the graphics' manufacturers went over to new (major) architectures.

(Anyone remember crying and kicking that Half Life 2 was running so sad? 😛)
 
Yes, and it was £130 when I bought mine not even a year after release. Considering the top card at the time was the 9800 XT, that was an incredible deal. And HL2 ran so beautifully. :)
 
My first proper discreet gfx card was an X1950Pro AGP 512MB (used
in a Dell Precision 650, later a home-build), was very impressed,
ran Oblivion nicely, etc., though I did run into some AA-related
driver issues. I particularly liked being able to obtain benchmark
results which were higher than review sites were getting with the
PCIe version of the card. 😀 My old system spec. The card now lives
in my gf's PC where it still functions perfectly (and I might
add, makes almost no noise at all since I fitted it after initial
purchase with an ACCELERO X2 cooler). Infact, the PC I built for
my gf is the quietest PC I've ever heard, grr... :}

When I wanted to upgrade (switched to PCIe), there didn't seem to
be an ATI product that quite fit the bill, so I bought an 8800GT -
again very impressed (though note at the time AMD had just *halved*
their 6000+ prices, so I did buy an AMD-based PCIe mbd). Latest
switch has been to two GTX 460 FTWs SLI on a P55.

It's crazy for people to say ATI was all bad, or NVIDIA was all
bad. Both companies made and still make some excellent products.
Both also made a few howlers over the years.

Fascinating that people have mentioned the 9800 so much. SGI used
the FireFL version of this (and the 9700) for their Onyx4 system,
which could use from 2 to 32 of them in parallel. See:

http://web.archive.org/web/20080317120717/http://www.sgi.com/products/remarketed/onyx4/
http://techpubs.sgi.com/library/manuals/4000/007-4634-002/pdf/007-4634-002.pdf

Typical example usage:

http://structbio.vanderbilt.edu/comp/hw/onyx/

For fans of the 9800, keep your eyes open, sometimes an Onyx4
appears on eBay.

Ian.

 
The author's personal experience with these cards doesn't seem to kick in until around 2004, because there are two really huge omissions before that.

The original "Radeon" was sold in 32 and 64 meg flavors, no number designations besides that. The Radeon 7000 name didn't occur until a year later.

Also, the Radeon 9700 was a BIG DEAL. It beat the pants off the GeForce 4 Ti and gave ATI a real shot in the arm both financially and credibility-wise. The 9800, while a great card, was just a followup.
 
I hope this finally means an end to the rabid fanboi-ism that for some reason the ATi label in particular seems to attract, especially that clueless moron Charlie Djemeran who couldn't write an unbiassed article on GPUs if his life depended on it.

I've owned many GPUs of both brands and without exception all the Ati cards I owned have had way more compatibility issues compared to any nVidia card I've owned. Personally I'm happier with something that just does its job without problems, especially under Linux, which is why I now just buy nVidia. That could still change if AMD ever come up with something of better quality though.

In the past, sometimes ATi's top end cards were faster, sometimes nVidia's, but its not usually by enough to be very noticeable in the real world, and who gives a crap about +/- a few FPS when the drivers keep the system or software from running well at all. The real value of professional-quality drivers (Linux especially) was something ATi never seemed to understand, not that the fanbois would ever admit it.

Lets hope that AMD will take up the slack though, as nVidia and even maybe Intel need good competition to push them and keep them working hard to make better stuff for all of us.
 
I have always been proati and have loved every card. From my frist aiw 128 and have a radeon hd4200 in my hp laptop. I still have almost every ati card I ever owned.
128mb 9700
256mb 9550
radeon 7000 64mb
rage pro turbo pci
radeon rage 6 sdr 32mb
radeon rage 6 ddr 64mb
my only ati regret is the ati x1250 onboard in my wifes acer.
very sorry to see the name go.
 
meh... not the best farewell. I know the ed caught this one inline but I've gotta mention again: The "first" time ati beat the competition is the x1950? I agree w/ ed that R300 was the first memory I have of a truly solid card that did not just win depending on the review, but soundly drubbed any other card on the market.

And in that, the "introduction" of the 9000 series was not a midrange card. It was the 9700pro and Nv was really on their heels through an entire generation with that one.

Not a fanboi here as I think history proves that Nv has had more time "at the top" than ati with less problems... just saying you missed the real icons of the ati history in nearly everything. (x1650? really?) Even total Nv evangelists would be able to see the lack of many of the meaningful competitive cards.

lame.
 
[citation][nom]agnickolov[/nom]Interesting how ATI's probably biggest success against nVidia wasn't even mentioned - Radeon 9700 Pro. That card completely obliterated its GeForce FX 5800 competitor and was superior even to the GeForce FX 5900 successor! At least its 9800 Pro successor is there...[/citation]


thats what i'm wondering geez they left out ati's gretest sucess , when the 9700 pro hit it blew the 5800 gf out of teh water in visual apperance of graphics and speed. and nothign topped it till ati released thier own gf 9800 which by the way toms failed to mention it was actualy released a good few months before teh gf 6000 series so it technically was not meant as competition to gf 6800 , gf 6800's competition was the x800 , btw i still got my ati 9700 pro , the fan died on it currently teh card sits in storage waiting to eventually be used on a nostalgia rig i'll build when i can find other old parts/OSes.
 
[citation][nom]saikyan[/nom]The author's personal experience with these cards doesn't seem to kick in until around 2004, because there are two really huge omissions before that.The original "Radeon" was sold in 32 and 64 meg flavors, no number designations besides that. The Radeon 7000 name didn't occur until a year later.Also, the Radeon 9700 was a BIG DEAL. It beat the pants off the GeForce 4 Ti and gave ATI a real shot in the arm both financially and credibility-wise. The 9800, while a great card, was just a followup.[/citation]


the radeon 9700 pro was not competeing with gf 4 , it was competing with gf 5800 (which it beat hands down in every aspect and way.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom