ATI

ATi Technologies produced graphics cards from the '80s through the mid '00s until merging with AMD in 2006. AMD still produces graphics cards today.

Graphics card series

Radeon

R100

Radeon 7500 64MB

The original Radeon was a Direct3D 7 visual processing unit (VPU), as ATi named it. It is a 2 pixel per clock design with 3 texture units on each of the 2 pixel pipelines. The 166 MHz Radeon DDR (aka 7200) is competitive with GeForce 256 DDR.

It supports environmental bump mapping (EMBM), unlike GeForce cards at the time. It has a basic form of anisotropic filtering that is high performance and offers a nice quality improvement but is highly angle-dependent and can not operate at the same time as trilinear filtering. It also offers ordered-grid supersampling anti-aliasing.

Backwards compatibility with old D3D 5 games is limited because of the lack of support for fog table and palettized textures. It is possible to enable fog table via registry tweaks but it was not officially supported.

R200

Radeon 8500 128MB

This generation is the first with Direct3D 8 compliance, actually DirectX 8.1. The Radeon 8500 is a 4 pipeline design with 2 texture units per pipeline and operates at up to 275 MHz. It is competitive with GeForce 3 Ti 500.

Improvements over the R100 generation include the aforementioned Direct3D 8.1 support, meaning pixel shader 1.4 and vertex shader 1.1 support. A wide variety of supersampling anti-aliasing modes are available (2-6x, quality/performance) which use a form of programmable jittered grid (similar to rotated grid). Anisotropic filtering is somewhat improved, with more levels supported, but is again very angle dependent and can not work with trilinear filtering. GeForce 3+ have higher quality anisotropic filtering but with a much higher performance impact.

Backwards compatibility with old D3D 5 games is limited because of the lack of support for fog table and palettized textures.

R300

Radeon 9800 Pro 256MB

The R300 GPUs are Direct3D 9 graphics chips. They have many improvements and noticeably better visual quality than prior chips. Radeon 9800 Pro is competitive with GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, but with Direct3D 9 games the GeForce FX falls far behind.

Anisotropic is vastly improved, with much lower angle-dependency and the ability to work with trilinear filtering. Anti-aliasing is now performed with 2-6x gamma-corrected rotated-grid multi-sampling anti-aliasing. MSAA operates only on polygon edges, which of course means no anti-aliasing within textures or of transparent textures, but expends far less fillrate and is thus useable at higher resolutions. NVIDIA does not match the quality of this MSAA until GeForce 8. However, ATi did not support any form of super-sampling with R300-R700, while NVIDIA did.

Backwards compatibility with old D3D 5 games is limited because of the lack of support for fog table and palettized textures.