Ati brings the Radeon 9700 and Intel is founded – that happened on July 18th. Every day, PC Games Hardware takes a look back at the young but eventful history of the computer.
…1968: Intel is founded – see the chip giant’s key milestones in our chip giant’s birthday special “internationalegrated Elelectronics”.
…2002: In the never-ending battle against Nvidia’s big competitor, Ati wins an important battle: Long before Nvidia’s NV30, the Canadians are presenting the first DirectX 9 accelerator on July 18, the R300 aka Radeon 9700. In fact, no card has yet been announced, the Radeon 9700 Pro comes later on the market – Ati is limited to introduce the graphics chipwhich later took second place in our readers’ poll after the most legendary Ati/AMD graphics chip.
The chip, declared as a “VPU” (Visual Processing Unit), is characterized by extensive programmability thanks to DirectX 9 support, which enables many new effects. But not only that, the R300 is also extremely fast with older games of the DirectX 8 generation; Hyper-Z 3 ensures high efficiency, the 256-bit wide video memory connection for massive memory bandwidth – 50 percent more performance than Nvidia’s top model Geforce 4 Ti-4600 is the rule, with anti-aliasing a multiple of that is also possible. Nvidia had to let the opportunity for a quick counterattack pass, only in the spring of 2003 did the counterattack follow with the NV30 – far too late and far too weak to change anything about Ati’s new technological leadership. The graphics market remains exciting, even without 3dfx.
You can find out more about Ati/AMD in AMD/Ati: Techdemos from 2001 to 2009 and in The 25 most important Ati graphics cards: From Rage to Radeon HD 4870 X2.
.
The post Intel is formed and the Radeon 9700 is coming (PCGH-Retro, July 18) appeared first on Gamingsym.