ATI's 3D RAGE PRO chips and boards leads industry in AGP performance and design wins

Business Wire, August 25, 1997

TORONTO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug. 25, 1997--(TSE ATY.) ATI Technologies Inc. (ATY:TSE), in conjunction with Intel's 440LX AGPset product announcement, announced today that its 3D RAGE PRO graphics accelerator has been selected by top PC computer manufacturers including COMPAQ, IBM, DELL, and ACER for their corporate and consumer AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) systems. Enabling high-performance graphics on all Pentium(r) II systems with the 440LX AGPset, ATI is the only graphics solution offering the hardware and software needed to take full advantage of AGP.

ATI has leveraged the strength of its 3D RAGE PRO chip to unseat competitors and increase its market share. "The graphics industry is undergoing a strategic inflection point as it transitions from PCI to AGP-based graphics," said Dean McCarron of Mercury Research. "We predict that 45 percent of new PC systems will switch to AGP graphics within the coming year."

Offering performance up to 4 times faster than other AGP solutions, ATI is the only graphics vendor currently supporting the AGP Texturing capability recommended in Intel's AGP specification. Other graphics vendors that have not implemented the complete AGP specification run the risk of delivering AGP performance that is even worse than today's PCI performance.

"ATI 3D RAGE PRO's full implementation of AGP helps IBM Aptiva maintain its leadership role in delivering outstanding multimedia and 3D graphics to the consumer marketplace" said Brian Dalgetty, IBM Aptiva marketing director. ATI is the first graphics vendor currently shipping the software drivers needed to enable the AGP capabilities in Windows 95. Other graphics products without these software drivers will be limited to addressing only the amount of memory available locally on the graphics card, resulting in lower quality and less detail.

"ATI's full 2X AGP solution delivers on the promise of AGP", said Martin Reynolds, Vice President of Technology Assessment at Dataquest, "Effective use of system memory through the AGP allows mainstream systems to support multimegabyte texture maps, delivering consumer applications with remarkable visual impact."

ATI's 3D RAGE PRO, the most complete AGP controller on the market

The 3D RAGE PRO supports the new AGP Texturing capability recommended by Intel's AGP specification. AGP Texturing improves parallelism by directly executing textures without having to load entire textures into the frame buffer. For example, a 4MB AGP solution will be able to address an additional 20MB of graphics memory by adding system memory. Other slower AGP offerings on the market today only support Local Texturing which must first load the entire texture into the frame buffer before processing. ATI supports both texturing capabilities today.

3D RAGE PRO also supports the fastest AGP Protocol: AGP 2X mode with the Sideband Addressing port and Pipelining. The Sideband Addressing (SBA) port and Pipelining provide superior performance by simultaneously transferring address and data request information along a separate port and by queuing requests for transactions. Using AGP 2X mode with the SBA port and Pipelining, the 3D RAGE PRO provides the most efficient way to transfer textures from system memory to the graphics controller

On a motherboard implementation or through a 3D RAGE PRO accelerator add-in board, the 3D RAGE PRO chip is the ideal accelerator to realize the full benefit of AGP with state-of-the-art 2D, 3D and video acceleration. A floating point set-up engine improves small-triangle performance, adding even more detail to 3D scenes and 3D RAGE PRO's 64-bit, 100 MHz SGRAM interface delivers 800 MB of low-latency frame buffer. "The 3D RAGE PRO is our choice for the best of the new bunch," said Peter N. Glaskowsky, senior analyst, MicroDesign Resources. "The 3D RAGE PRO design emphasizes fast floating-point set-up calculation, efficient caches, and a fast, flexible local-memory controller."

XPERT@Play and XPERT@Work boards put it all together

Today ATI is also introducing AGP versions of its successful graphics accelerator add-in boards, the XPERT@Play and the XPERT@Work. For users who want the fastest and highest-performing graphics accelerators on the market, the XPERT@Play AGP and the XPERT@Work AGP boards provide the best performance and highest quality as well as the large-texture benefits of AGP technology.

The XPERT@Play has set new standards for gaming, multimedia and mainstream graphics acceleration applications, combining a powerful 2D accelerator, industry-leading 3D acceleration, an MPEG card and PC to TV technology. XPERT@Play AGP further enhances the 3D experience with large-texture games and other graphic applications.

The XPERT@Work is leading the way for Windows NT and Win `95 performance with superior 2D, 3D and video acceleration that is ideal for the most demanding business applications. XPERT@Work AGP will also allow designers, CAD and DTP users to create images with much larger textures than was previously possible.